All this means that a translator has a considerable responsibility to convey the author’s voice and style and help the author communicate with the readers in a foreign language that should feel like her own.
Choosing a Translator for Your Book
We have translated all kinds of books—from fiction to business literature to highly specialized technical documentation to self-help books and medical training manuals. It would simply be impossible, as you can imagine, to find a single translator who would be both this knowledgeable and that creative.
That is why we approach each book translation project individually. We select and assign the best translators for the job—in terms of their expertise for any technical translation projects and their creative capabilities for literary and fiction translation projects.
Translator Approval Process
Translating a book often requires a special knowledge and experience. To find the best match for each project, we have developed our vendor onboarding & approval process.
How it works:
- Before we begin working on a project, we discuss with the client any specific experience and skill requirements.
- We screen and approve our translators based on the individual criteria.
- To be approved, each candidate is expected to pass a book excerpt translation test.
- In the end, however, it’s the client who has the last word in the vendor approval process.
Native-Speaker Quality
Whether you write novels or short stories, long-form magazine articles or academic research papers, you have got a good chance to reach international audiences thanks to today’s easily accessible channels of digital content distribution. Nowadays, you can instantly communicate any content in any format across continents. And the only obstacle that stands in the path of your original content towards the global audience is its language. We know that your book will need more than just a grammatically flawless translation. To bring to life your original writing, its translation will need to capture its authentic flair—its style and register, tone and flow, precise meaning and genuine emotion. Our literary translators, proofreaders, and editors are themselves experienced in creative writing, blogging, and other multimedia content. Most importantly, however, they translate only into their native languages while maintaining the near-native knowledge of the source languages they work with.
Book Translation: Challenges and Pitfalls
The cultural, and historical, knowledge of the language is as crucial as the knowledge of the language itself. Only native speakers would understand the cultural references, humor, idiomatic expressions, and nuanced subtextual minutiae of shared cultural codes communicated in the book in its original language.
To ensure linguistic and cultural accuracy, we start any literary translation project with a detailed overview of the content and together develop a general workflow plan.
Quality Assurance
Book translation is not an exact science. Nor can it be fully automated or outsourced. Literary translation is an inherently human collaborative endeavor. Nonetheless, while encouraging the best aspects of human input in our projects, we remain vigilant of any negative human factors.
To ensure ultimate accuracy and timely delivery, we complement the professional input from our highly skilled proofreaders and editors with automated QA support. Having developed and operating in strict compliance with our quality assurance procedures, we provide the most accurate translations in their native formats. At Profpereklad, we guarantee that your book will be handled professionally and that you will be delivered a high-quality multilingual rendition of your work.
Copyright – Book Translation Agency
Not all our customers are aware of another important aspect of book translations: namely, the copyright ownership over the translated version of the book if provided by a third party, e.g., by a translation agency. Not all book translation companies are scrupulous enough to care for the customer’s interests.
At Profpereklad, we ensure that our clients have the copyrights over their books transferred to them, with the copyright transfer service fee included in the total project price from the very beginning of the project.
Book Translation Fees
Each book is unique, requiring an individual approach and a tailored set of skills and expertise. As such, each project has to be assessed and negotiated on a case-to-case basis. Nonetheless, we promise that our rates never exceed the average market rates.
We are looking forward to receiving your book translation inquiry, to which we will quickly respond with our commercial proposal package, including a booklet with professional tips for organizing and managing the translation of your book.