Category: Translation
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How the CAT Tool Is Costing You Credibility
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You know the feeling. You don’t speak French fluently, but you have a bilingual colleague skimming the French translation of your annual safeguarding report. They stop, frown, and look up. “Is it wrong?” you ask. “No,” they say, hesitating. “Grammar is perfect. Terminology is compliant. Numbers match.” “So it’s good?”…
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Vicarious trauma in translation work: why duty of care matters
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It is 11:00 AM on a Tuesday in a quiet home office in Lyon. The coffee is lukewarm. The street outside is silent, save for a passing delivery van. On the screen, however, the world is ending. The translator—let’s call her Elena—is working on a witness statement from the eastern…
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When Ebola Posters Failed: What I Learned Translating Life or Death Instructions
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Picture a poster on the wall of an Ebola treatment center in Guinea, 2014. It shows the symptoms to watch for: fever, vomiting, bleeding. It lists what to do: wash hands, avoid contact, seek help. It carries a message that, in communities where touching the dead is a sacred duty,…
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Humanitarian Translators as First Responders
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Seventy-two hours after the earthquake, the field hospital begins to fill. The patients aren’t just arriving with crush injuries anymore; they are arriving with the first, shivering signs of infectious disease. Rumors metastasize in five languages. The water is poisoned. The aid workers are stealing children. The vaccines cause paralysis.…
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Quality is not a happy accident: it’s engineered
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Stop treating translation like a gamble. Discover why high-quality translation is an engineered outcome based on industrial standards like ISO 17100 and precise specifications, and learn how professional workflows protect your global brand from liability and revenue loss.
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CORPORATE VOICE : English vs FRench
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English corporate communication tends to pull everyone toward the center. French pushes them to the edges. If you read the corporate blog of a major American multinational, you might notice a pattern. The CEO sounds friendly and accessible. The CTO sounds approachable and simple. The Ombudsman sounds helpful and polite.…
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Working With a Translator: When the Project Manager Checks Out
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Part of the series “Working With a Translator: A Guide for Clients” You send your files to the agency.You get translations back.Some are fine. Some are… strangely flat. Some cause problems three months later when a parent complains, or a donor queries a sentence in your report. On paper, there’s…
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Between Home and Elsewhere: Domestication and foreignization in translation
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Every translator knows the feeling: you hit a sentence and think, Do I make this sound like it was written here, or do I let it sound like it travelled? For EN–FR translators, project managers and revisers, that question is where readability, ethics, and cultural risk collide. That tension sits…
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When Legal Systems Don’t Match
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This article is based on personal notes, professional experience, and research in comparative legal translation. It is offered as a supportive resource for fellow translators, revisers, and multilingual professionals navigating legal systems. You’re welcome to share or reference this work — with proper attribution to Words We Trust. Please note: this content…
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What Clients Should Know Before Asking for Legal Translation
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Legal translation isn’t only a service. It’s legal infrastructure. It connects jurisdictions, enforces obligations across borders, and upholds the integrity of international frameworks. At Words We Trust, we work with lawyers, NGOs, international institutions, and compliance teams to ensure their documents are translated with clarity, precision, and legal integrity. Here’s…