About Us

For over 12 years, Trans-Lang has been providing interpretation and translation services to clients in municipal, state and federal government, as well as individuals and businesses of all sizes. In its inception, Trans-Lang filled a need that existed for extremely well qualified interpreters in the English-to-Spanish language pair. The location of the business – San Diego – afforded Trans-Lang a unique ability to handle projects large and small from Southern California to the Baja Peninsula. Over time, our firm gained a reputation for high quality service in a multitude of languages. Today our clients can be confident that we will always deliver our services accurately, on-time and on-budget.

The following work plan describes what you can expect on a typical assignment:

Interpretation

Trans-Lang assigns a project manager to have complete oversight over every client project from beginning to end. The PM acts as the sole point of contact to simplify communication with the client. At the beginning of every project, the PM will start with a thorough analysis of the client’s requirements such as specific language needs, project begin and completion dates/times, qualifications of the linguists that will work on the project, etc. For interpreting events, the PM will communicate with the client and establish venue, date, and time information and will also arrange for our technician to set-up equipment at least 45 minutes prior to an event start time (should interpreting equipment be needed). The PM will ensure that all interpreters have pertinent assignment information and that they are given any available reference material to familiarize themselves with the subject matter for the event they will be interpreting at. The PM also will ensure the interpreters (and any other personal needed)  arrive to a work-site no later than 30 minutes before start-time. The PM will also make sure the client has all contact numbers both for the PM and for each individual interpreter as well as the technician (if needed).

Interpretation assignments of longer than two hours typically require two qualified linguists (for each target language) who share the workload by switching off every 30-60 minutes. In this manner, our linguists stay mentally fresh and able to handle the complex topics often associated with our conference interpreting assignments. A typical simultaneous interpreting assignment will consist of a conference-type environment where a speaker or group of speakers is conveying a message to an audience of people with a different target language or an audience of several different target languages. The range in duration for these events is anywhere from 2 hours, to 2 or more days. A typical conference interpreting assignment lasts from 4 to 8 hours.

Logistics

Planning by our technician and logistics coordinator is an integral part of our overall work process. This allows us to identify our equipment needs for a particular assignment and begin preparation, including transporting the equipment, when equipment should arrive on-site, what the work-site will have available in terms of equipment connections and whether or not coordination is needed with other vendors. On the day of the assignment, we prefer to set-up our equipment at least one hour prior to the event. This gives us ample time to work out any additional equipment requirements or trouble-shoot any issues that may come up.

Translation

For translation projects the assigned Project Manager will do an analysis of client requirements and establish appropriate time-lines to ensure the translation is done at a consistent rate and with ample time for proofreading and other quality control checks. The PM will be available to the client throughout the entirety of the translation process and will be available to provide updates on the progress of the translation on an as needed/requested basis.

CAT (Computer Aided Translation) tools.

Translation Project Management Software aids the PM in keeping track of each project from beginning to end. On large translation projects, (over 30,000 words), our PM will utilize the software to portion out content for translation among several qualified translators while ensuring that all deadlines are met and that each translator completes his/her task according to the requirements set forth at the beginning of the project. On large translation projects, Trans-Lang may also utilize translation memory software to assist our human translators by automatically translating redundant content or content similar to that already translated. Translation memory software also allows us to create project-specific glossaries that greatly aid in uniformity and create proper continuity in projects with several translators. At the completion of all translation projects a human proofreader will go over all translated material to eliminate any errors, omissions, etc. The use of project management and translation memory software allow Trans-Lang to provide translation services in a very cost effective manner by helping our administrators, managers and translators be extremely efficient in their tasks. Trans-Lang firmly believes the best translations are still done by human linguists but project management and translation memory software are effective tools that allow our human translators to deliver translation projects in a timely manner while increasing precision, continuity and uniformity.