A good friend is worth their weight in gold, as the saying goes, and we are not about to argue with that. But when you need an email translated, or any translation at all, is that friend really the person you should be calling?

How many times have you read something that simply did not make sense? Badly translated texts, assignments and essays are easy to find. Why? The answer is simple: they were not done by a professional. You may well think the person who translated it was a native speaker, so it should not have turned out that way. But native does not mean professional. Let us give you an example to make it clearer. Say you need to translate an email for professional use, or a covering letter to go with your CV. You can hold your own in the language you want to translate into, but not enough to send the text out to the world, so you decide to hand it to someone else. This is the crucial moment. You have two options: have it done by a professional company that will get it right, such as AlosIdiomas, or leave it in the hands of your neighbour, who you know spent years living abroad and says they can translate it for you without any trouble.

You decide to give your neighbour a chance and let them translate it. What happens next?

That person, who is not a professional, translates it as best they can. Anything they do not know, they look up in the dictionary, or even in Google Translate. And in the end they finish it and you have it ready to send.

Translations completed

But the recipient, the person reading it in the foreign language, happens to be a native speaker. And they start spotting mistakes. Grammatical errors, shifts in the meaning of words that pull the whole text out of context. Mistakes made because translating a text is not simply swapping one set of words for another, one set of sentences for another.

Translating a piece of work goes a little further. It means finding the meaning the writer wanted to convey, and rendering it without losing that meaning. You could say it means rewriting it. That is why, when your friend translated it, they did so with the best of intentions but with plenty of gaps and a lack of expertise. So if you need to translate a university assignment, a text or any other document, do not hesitate to get in touch with us. That way you can be sure all your translations are done properly. At AlosIdiomas we have a team of professionals who are keen to help you. Follow us on social media and keep up with all our news. You will find us on facebook, instagram and Linkedin.