Foreign translations

[mobilebadboy]

I've been sitting here wondering about getting (hiring) someone to translate certain stuff into another language, such as Spanish. I don't believe finding someone to do it would be the hard part, but how on earth do you know someone translated everything properly, and didn't slip anything in that shouldn't be there?

Babelfish and the like do a poor job of translation, so I'd prefer someone who actually speaks the language, but not knowing anything other English, I'd have no way of knowing they did the job right.

Open to suggestions and tips. I'm not looking for anything immediate, since bills come first, but down the road I'd be looking for something like this.

[Westech]

I've been looking into the same thing. It seems that the 2 choices are:

1. Hire some bilingual "kid" from a forum to translate for you. The quality might not be great, but you can probably get it done very cheaply. If you are worried about things being slipped in or translated incorrectly, you could hire 2 "forum kids" (they're cheap!) Use one to translate, and the other to verify the translation. It's probably best to get them from two unrelated forums so there's less chance they know each other. Another verification option would be to plug their translation into babelfish and make sure that nothing extra was slipped in.

2. Hire a professional translation service. This would be more expensive, but you'd be more assured of projecting a good image with proper grammar, wording, etc.

I would use option #1 for content sites where I'm getting revenue from advertising, and option #2 for company or ecommerce sites where image counts.