Spanish Version of Brochure?

[kcrossley]

I need to create a Spanish version of a 20-pg. brochure that I designed in InDesign. What software or service do you recommend for the initial English-to-Spanish conversion? 

I know that translators aren't always 100% accurate, so I'll have my client, who is Spanish, do the final proofing. Thanks!

[Joel Cherney]

Are you looking for a reputable translation firm? Are you looking for an auotmated service where you upload an IDML and get a Spanish IDML back? Are you trying to find a paid service or a free service?  I honestly can't tell exactly what you are looking for. In the language industry, "convert" only means "convert this Quark file to an InDesign file" or "convert this raw text to an Excel file." We never use that word to mean "translate this from English to Spanish." Likewise, I only ever hear the word "translator" as "get this document to a human who is a great Spanish writer, who is a native Spanish speaker, but who is completely fluent in English." 

I have tools that will give me a "translation" of an InDesign file, automatically generated by my machine translation tools. However, I would never give that to a client to review; I know that my toolset isn't up to the task of making a client-ready translation. There's a whole separate kind of editor doing "post-MT editing," which basically means cleaning up after an AI. It's paid at a higher rate when compared to the task of cleaning up after a human translator, because it's a lot more work. So if your desired "software or service" is an automated one, I can make some recommendations, but it'd be like advising you on how to, I dunno, walk through the desert with no water. I can give you advice, having done it myself, but I can't reccomend it. 

But, assuming you wanted to pay a person or firm to translate your brochure, I'd be happy to make some reccomendations, but I'd need to know more about what you are working on. I know exactly who I'd send you to if your twenty-pager was a brochure related to biosciences, for example, but that firm would be a poor choice if you were working on a twenty-page real estate brochure. 

[kcrossley]

Hi Joel,

Thanks for your response. I was originally thinking about English-to-Spanish translation software, but as you've stated above, they have a lot of problems—especially when it comes to grammar and punctuation. I would prefer to use a human translator, but I want someone fluent in Spanish. The brochure I'm working on is for a Catholic cemetery, so there are a lot of terms that are specific to that industry, such as consecrated, cremation, entombment, interred, Mass, memorialization, rite of committal, etc. 

I checked fiverr.com, and there are a lot of choices, but it's hard to tell who is legitimate and who is using translation software. Any recommendations you have would be greatly appreciated. 

Thanks,
Kelly

[Joel Cherney]

That is a very specific subject matter, and the translator I knew who specialized in exactly that subject matter area has unfortunately recently retired. She'd been a funeral director in both the US and Mexico. More importantly, I wouldn't have been sending you directly to her; I would have sent you to a translation firm that worked with her, where they'd already have paired her with an editor, captured her typical phrases in a terminology database, knew how to work with IDML, and all the other stuff that you'd get by working with a firm instead of directly with a translator on Fiverr.

Working directly with a translator on one of those freelancer hubs can be cost-effective, but you're not paying for the project management work, the translator vetting, the termbase operation & such. My analogy here is that when you go the grocery store and buy a chicken, it's already been plucked and gutted, and in some cases deboned, right? It's been processed already. If you work with a translator directly, you get a chicken, still squawking.  Maybe you can work with that? 

At any rate, I'll ask my contacts "who do we go to for EN->SP funerary translations, now that Sra X has finally retired?" and I should have something for you early next week.