STAR TS Translation Services Blog

Have you ever met someone and know immediately where they comes from – just by hearing them speak? Accents and tone of voice are often overlooked as powerful means of communication with its intonation, word pronunciations and its expressions.

There are now a multitude of accents in every language all around the world. Accent actually is a legacy of our history; it symbolizes our roots, regional habits, our country. It’s a real identity sign. It defines who you are and where you come from.

Lets look at the English Language: There are a number of variant English accents. Obviously there is the native English accent to the United Kingdom (in all its forms, versions and regional accents). Irish people speak English – so we find the Irish accent, there is the North American accent, Scottish accent, Australian accent and so on. For English natives, it’s easy to identify who is who and what region they come from. For foreigners, however, it’s difficult to always understand.

Besides the geographical aspect, we note for several centuries, accent has been associated with social status. This concept is fading now, but has long been seen as standard. The neutral accent, or no accent, would have been aligned with important people in social hierarchy.  Regional accents have long handicapped poorer people seeking to find a job, for example. Today the neutral accent is often used in politics or on television. Listen to BBC or SKY news. A lot of the presenters whilst coming from a wide variety of national backgrounds speak in a very similar tone and accent.

Accent can be quickly identified, but often divided into categories and described in social terms as: “Ugly”, “Beautiful”, “sexy” and so on…
So there is another definition of how you are seen by your accent. Have you ever spoken to someone on the phone only to find them a “different person” when you meet them face to face?

An American study by Language and Psychology Departments at Stanford University, tested some 3,000 Americans whilst flirting. This study showed that the English accent that seems to appeal most to men, whilst women preferred the Irish accent.

In France, study by the “Parship” dating website, shows that the southern accent (Toulouse city), is the most charming. However the Northern accent, illustrated by the French film “Welcome to the land of Ch’tit”, is just described as funny.

Generally, Facebook fan page users of Lonely Planet travel guide chose in order, the Spanish accent, French accent and Irish accent as sexiest ! (Study for Valentines Day Context).

So what’s your favorite accent ?

Extracted from source : “A Little Book of Language” – by David Crystal

http://www.freelang.com/blog/lorigine-des-accents-regionaux,2011-03/

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/19246/british-accent-no-longer-sexy-study-finds/

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/blog/2011/02/15/whats-the-worlds-sexiest-accent/

If you want to say “I Love You” in other languages visit http://www.star-ts.com/iloveyou : – .You can here lots of different audio samples.

We’re often asked, how to I know that you can translate my website or application? Sometimes developers need to check – will their application still function correctly after it is translated?

Often due to bad coding practices a program might crash or perhaps not all the text is visible to the translator so can’t be translated. How do you test your product without paying a translation company to translate all your product? So how do you check your product can be translated?

Simple: Pseudo Translation.

Pseudo translation is a technique we use at STAR that can model a translation quickly an easily. Basically its a pretend or mock translation. In simple terms what you do is replace all the vowels with accented characters (foreign language characters). So just like the “Hello” logo above we pseudo translated this to “Hélló”. We can do this for free for most clients we work with and it is really fast.  It serves three key purposes:

1. You can see if your product still works with foreign characters.

2. Your English team can check your product out easily as they can still read the text.

3. You can clearly check that all your text is visible to the translation company and translatable.

Visit our Pseudo Translation page for a more technical description.

If you’re developing a product its useful to talk to your language partner early on in the design of your product, we can give you advice on how best to design your brochures, products and websites to ensure they are easy to translate when the time comes.

Alexa Website Ranking

A common topic we often discuss with clients is their website ranking. They come to us saying they are not getting traffic and are not sure about translation as how will the know if the translated site will get traffic as well?

STAR can help you with your international web traffic, but lets just look at English websites for now as its the perfect starting point. SEO and web ranking is a bit of a black art, there is magic and there is some science involved. However the average user can get some basic information themselves to gauge whats going on. One such free system is Alexa.Com.

Alexa.Com is own and managed by Amazon.com so you know they have a good reputation.  Its not 100% perfect so you have to take it with a pinch of salt as they say in English.

Alexa tracks users who use their system (free toolbar etc) to search the internet. So its a measure of how popular your site is within their users.

So the good side is, is that the system is consistent – you get consistent results from a portion of the internet users worldwide. For any good webmaster or SEO guru that is good enough for you to track whether your traffic is improving or not. You should track this every month and see how you are doing.It can take up to 90 days for some web changes to impact your SEO ranking.

Did you know it typically takes about 90 days for any major change to your website to appear on Google

To use the system you just go to the site rank page and enter your websites URL.

It will tell you roughly what keywords are being used to find your site, how many inbound links you have and your overall traffic ranking.

Next time we’ll discuss multilingual SEO and how STAR can help you deliver your website the right language to drive more business to your website.

Bill Payne angel investor and Damian Scattergood of STAR translation at HotHouse event on Fundable Startups.

Thursday 19th April 2012 was a fantastic day here in Docklands when we had the chance to meet Bill Payne, Americas 2009 Angel Investor of the year. Bill has invested in over 50 companies including DoubleClick. His successful track record makes amazing reading.

Bill was visiting the Hothouse entrepreneurship program based in Docklands Innovation Park where STAR has its Dublin office.  So it was great to be able to meet and discuss this topic with him. The title of his presentation was “Fundable Companies” which caught my eye straight away. At the end of the day the real question for any investor or managing director is : “Is the project or company actually fundable?” All too often business plans have great ideas and lots of out of the air sales figures and projections but what investors look for is what the core business actually is.

Management Team is key.

One of the key factors that Bill highlighted was the strength of the management team. You may have a great product and a million dollar market, but can you actually manage the company when it gets to that size? As companies grow you have to evaluate your management skills (across the company) and ascertain who is the right person to manage it and what skills they require. The skills to manage a 5 person startup are not the same as those required to manage a 100 person company.  Sometimes a CEO has to decide and plan when they need to be replaced. If you are looking to have an exit sale of your company perhaps it is better to put in a CEO that has done it before so they can manage up and out for that trade sale.

But I’m Only A Startup.

Ok so you might not be the million dollar company looking to be bought out if you are just a startup. Again Bill offered some excellent advice on how to manage the early start investment (or whatever cash you had) and how to focus on building your company. Start-up companies should first consider:

1.Where to focus?

2.How to spend and manage cash?

3.And where to build the correct value in your organization?

Angels are people too.

Young entrepreneurs often forget that Angels are people too. They have the same concerns and worries about a business as you do. They may have the money you need to build a company but have to be careful where they put it. Bill told us that 50% of his investments go nowhere. That’s a lot of money to lose. So he looks for companies that might deliver back 20 times return. If you were looking to have an angel invest between 500k and 1 million in your company, they would be looking at getting 20 million in a trade sale in perhaps 5 years. So think before you leap.

The Top 7 Tips Bill gave us where:

1. Management team is important.

2. Scalability: Your business needs to be able to scale fast (production, people and management skills).

3. Angel investors tend to invest in local companies – so do you homework on who is in your area.

4. Potential fund-able companies should be customer ready. You should have some customers and a little traction in the market. Angel money gives you the funding you need to scale, it is not research money.

5. Competitive Advantage: You need to have some form of competitive advantage. If someone can copy you tomorrow and take the market away forget it. It doesn’t mean you need IP rights etc, this can come later, just an edge to get the first 10 million in sales!

6. Niche Markets helps. If you are in a market the big companies aren’t looking at, you can take market share quickly.

7. Sales and marketing plan: Make sure you have a proper sales plan. Not we’ll get 1% of the market by 2012. How are you actually going to sell your product?

If you are interested in learning more about Bill Paynes system for ensuring you are investment ready check out his website on http://www.billpayne.com/

Are you investable ? – follow Bill here

By STAR Translation Services

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in business after english

Mandarin is the official spoken language in China. It is spoken by 845 million people. According to Bloomberg Rankings, it is now scored highest in a ranking of languages for business usefulness, excluding English.

The Rankings takes into account:

-the number of speakers,

-the number of countries where the language is official,

-economical rates,

-educational rates…

Doing business in Asia will call more and more for language abilities to be successful in non-English-speaking countries. It provides advantages by being closer to the culture and habits and it also favors connections in a faster and more complex business environment.

French with 68 million speakers and Arabic with 221 speakers are ranked second and third. Spanish came in fourth ranking with 329 speakers worldwide.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Mandarin and Cantonese are often confused when people request translation services for China. It is easy to confuse them as the written form can be different depending on the country you are in. We’ve produced a simple table explaining the differences between Chinese languages and dialects for you.

by STAR Translation Services

Kenny starts four-day Business Visit to China

The Taoiseach Enda Kenny is on the last of his four-day visit to China. He is joining a trade mission involving 90 companies from Ireland. The purpose of Kenny’s current visit to China is to encourage economic and trade collaboration between Ireland and China.

Ireland has advantages which China can benefit from and China represents a vast market for Irish goods and services.

Irish companies are engaged in a continuous dynamic process of transformation centered on innovation and internationalization.

“Both Ireland and China have moved rapidly toward a knowledge-based economy built on innovation and technology, and our companies have all the elements for working more closely together.”, said Mr Kenny.

Irish culture is very popular in China and there is a great interest in Ireland among Chinese tour operators. There are also great links and possibilities in the education sector.

Mr Kenny’s visit follows the recent visit to Ireland of Xi Jinping, vice-president of China. Mr Xi said he was deeply impressed by his recent visit to Ireland and that he had many pleasant memories of the warm welcome he received in Ireland last month, reports RTE News/World.

As we are midway through Seachtain Na Gaeilge we thought we’d ask – just how popular is Irish?

STAR as a translation company we provide translation in over 45 languages including Irish from our offices here in Dublin 3.
We did an analysis of all our translation for 2011 and are happy to publish the results for our Irish readers.

Top 10 Languages 2011

As you might imagine our closest international neighbours are top with German and French being the most popular languages we translated last year.

Irish follows closely at number 3. Into English translation is number 4 (from various languages).

Our Japanese teams are kept very busy at number 5. Japanese is very specialised and the quality demand of the market is exceptionally high.

An interesting one in the mix is Swedish which comes in at number 8 in the list. Maybe this is the IKEA influence in Ireland.

By STAR Translation Services

A great event with fantastic colour and skills.

Welcome Bejing Tourism to Dublin.

Last night we had great pleasure in attending the Magical Bejing Tour of Pandas. The event took place in the fabulous Convention Centre Dublin (theccd.ie)

The event was hosted by the Bejing Municipal Commission of Tourism Development, and Tourism Ireland and was attended by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Andrew Montague.

It was full of amazing color and spectacular. The story follows a group of pandas on their path to excellence – learning many martial arts skills along the way.

There where dancing Pandas and martial arts demonstrations that where world class and a beauty to behold. The show for me really highlighted Chinese culture and their understanding of balance. Fighting skills where combined with the beauty of dance, fantastic sound, music and action. In the same light as Yin/Yang both balance each other the show highlighted this to perfection. The Chinese have a great understanding of colour, sound, movement and balance.

Damian Scattergood, Managing Director of STAR Translation and Andrew Montague, Lord Mayor of Dublin discuss the evenings fantastic show.

The evenings event was put together by Bejing Art-creation and Cultural development Limited. The performers includes Jet Lee’s Schoolmates and some of the production team of Bejing Olympics.

The children who attended where entertained by the amazing kung-fu pandas. They had both comical antics coming into the crowd and bouncing large red ‘”Welcome Bejing’  beach balls across the audience.

Members of the Bejing Municipal Committee and Lord Major of Dublin share their enjoyment of the show.

The show featured many different styles of martial arts and dance. My favorite Tai Chi was included alongside Kung Fu, Kung Fu Boxing. Monkey warriors danced and fly across the stage showing amazing acrobatic skills.

Shi Sha Hi, street dance crowded with people and possessing extraordinary Kung Fu skills.

Overall a fantastic night was had by all. It was a perfect blend of culture and business combined. Did you know there are over 100,000 Chinese people living in Ireland.

The event was perfectly run to allow both cultures to blend together and show each other the best of tourism from China and Ireland.

Congratulations and Thank you to all involved.
Damian Scattergood

Managing Director
STAR Dublin

Kung Fu Masters show Dublin their fighting skills and the beauty of dance combined.

Chinese Masters perform at the CCD.

STAR Provides Chinese Translation Services to clients in Ireland and the UK. With our own offices in Bejing and Shanghai we can deliver professional translation of your documents, brochures and websites to help you communicate in Chinese.

Welcome To The Students From Université Lille 3

Université Lille 3 Visit to STAR Dublin

19 french students from the Master TSM of Université Lille 3 came to visit our offices at STAR Translation Services Dublin with 4 of their teachers on Thursday. The group study languages and translation and in their last year of Masters in Specialised Translation. Their visit was to learn more about the professional translation industry and how they can advance their career in the world of translation. Most of them will become translators, project managers or localization engineers in the language industry.  STAR was delighted to welcome them to our facilities and share our knowledge and experience with them.

Université Lille 3 Visits STAR Dublin

After visiting our office accompanied by Damian Scattergood Managing Director of STAR Dublin, they took the opportunity to present their Master programme to STAR. Three of the students spoke publicly about their class, the tools they learn to use and their career opportunities. We had some interesting questions for them about their main concerns as students ready to enter the employment market. On one hand, as globalization is a common criteria to develop business, they feel that the market always needs more and more translation. On the other hand, the translation sector attracts many experienced professionals and applicants. Hence the necessity to develop their work experience and their visibility to prospective employers. They are aware that they have to differentiate themselves in the market to achieve their career goals. Following our very active discussion and fun talk about the translation at STAR, we are sure that they have all the skills they need to realise their ambitions. The university is very active and gives the students an excellent background in all important areas of translation, localization and software technology. Industry experience is also part of the masters which really benefits the students careers prospects.

Presentation by Master TSM Université Lille 3

Damian Scattergood Managing Director of STAR Dublin also talked about STAR Translation Services to the students. After presenting the company, their main customers and the different range of services we provide, he explained the work at STAR Translation Services. STAR focus on people to ensure a quality service, process to ensure accurate translation and technology to ensure consistant results. All our translators are native speaker and we aim to develop a long-term relationship with them. Besides, STAR TS is a ISO 9001:2008 Certified Translation Provider which is a guarantee that the process we use provides an effective service to our cutomers. We were asked about the certifications we had and also about economic questions regarding the impact that the global financial crisis has had on our business and the way we view outsourcing. So there was a very interesting debate around this. We also discussed the challenges becoming a translator in a more and more technological world since automatic translation systems like Google translator become more sophisticated.

Damian Scattergood presents STAR Translation Services

STAR regularly welcomes students for internship. Through the years we have developped a range of partnerships with colleges and universities to contribute to the training of students. They have the opportunity to  work alongside our professional translators and gain experience in the translation business. A big “Thank you” to all the students and teachers from Université Lille 3 for a sharing their students experience with us.

If you are interested in applying for an internship in our company you can submit your application on Jobs in STAR Dublin.

How to say I love you in many languages.

To help you this Valentines day we have produced a video that helps you say I Love You in multiple languages. Share, Learn and Enjoy.

Now you can say I love you in French, German, Italian, Irish, Japanese and Chinese.

Visit our main site for more ways to say I love you.

STAR provides translation services in over 40 languages. We are passionate about helping people communicate around the globe.

How are you going to say “I Love You” this Valentines day?