Why hire a professional translator?
“Over in Japan, you say ‘I’m tickled to death to be here,’ and when they translate it into Japanese, it comes out ‘He scratches himself until he dies.’” —John Hartford (the Colorado Springs Independent, June 14, 2001) In addition to the all-too-common gaffes, as illustrated in the above quote from music legend John Hartford, there are many other reasons to hire a professional translator. You naturally expect that a translation done by a professional would be faster and better, but what you may not realize is that it often is less expensive. Mistakes made by non-professionals can be extremely costly, both financially and in terms of your company’s image. Officials in Jerusalem learned this the hard way, when, after relying on a nonnative speaker’s knowledge of English, they distributed tens of thousands of copies of a pamphlet to promote the city as a tourist destination before discovering that the Hebrew for “Jerusalem—there’s no city like it!” had been translated as “Jerusalem—there’s
