Date: December 2009
Adelphi go Limited for the New Decade
Adelphi Translations Ltd. Ltd

Adelphi have now become a Limited Company. Our company registration number is: 06989736

Date: November 2009
Bye Bye Vivian, Hello Aneta
Farewell to Viv

It is with a tear in our eye that we say farewell to Vivian Yee who has been our chief project manager for two years. She decided that, after five years in the UK, it was time to go home before she became too British to leave. After a short stay in Dubai she will return home to Malaysia in December. Viv was an excellent project manager and kept us all in line.

We will miss her but we are happy to announce that we have now taken into the Adelphi fold Aneta Pawlowska. Aneta is from Poland and will be our chief project manager from December.

Date: October 2009
Understanding Arthritis
English Audio Recording

It is often a requirement for local authorities to provide audio versions of their information materials and Adelphi provide foreign language recordings from our in-house digital recording facility. Don't forget, however, that we can also provide English audio recordings too! This latest project, for a Birmingham based agency, was a informational recording for the Birmingham Arthritis Resource Centre.

Date: October 2009
One door opens .....
James Seawell leaves Adelphi

Our chief sales officer, James Seawell, has decided to move on to pastures new after a couple of years wiith Adelphi. We'd like to thank James for his sterling work in marketing and sales and wish him all the best in his new post. His place will be taken in the New Year by Hiroko Sutcliffe, who will head the sales department from February 2010.

Date: August 2009
Not so run-of-the Mill group
Adelphi gains orders from the CIH exhibition

After meeting them at the Harrogate Housing exhibition The Mill Group tested Adelphi with a recording project in seven languages with an extremely tight deadline and budget. With our own recording studio we were able to keep control of the project and produce everything to specification. We are now happy to say we are the prefered supplier for the company.

Date: July 2009
Adelphi at Harrogate
Adelphi welcome you to our stand at the Housing Exposition, Harrogate

On June the 12th and 13th Adelphi presented themselves at stand 471 at the Housing Exposition in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

Date: June 2009
Adelphi are tested again
Psychometric test translation through a Content Management System

The Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) had a multilingual project for us which required Adelphi's translators working with the company's own Content Management System (CMS). Adelphi has a lot of experience with CMS and we and our tech-savvy translators are happy to work with any company's on-line system.

Date: May 2009
Let us be your (multilingual) guide
Audio guides for museums

ATS Heritage approached Adelphi to help them produce a tour guide in Gaelic Irish which was to be used in two museums. Adelphi sourced both male and female voice artists to provide the dialogues for the tour guide. Using Adelphi's in-house recording facilities allowed us, once again, to bring in a recording project on-time and within budget.

Date: April 2009
Right to left languages on the web cause no problems for Adelphi
Gripple in Sheffield produce a new website and printed materials

Gripple have been working with Adelphi for a while now, producing text for their new website and printed material.

Adelphi produced translations for the various web pages and case studies as well as marketing brochures and information leaflets in eight European languages as well as Arabic.

Right-to-left languages, which mainly use a variation on the Arabic script, can be a nightmare to handle with standard software. Even in the twenty-first century many applications refuse to recognise right-to-left languages. This includes image packages such as Photoshop, Video editing software like Adobe Encore (see March 2009) and industry standard typesetting applications such as Indesign and Quark Xpress. Adelphi has invested in the 'Middle-East' versions of these popular packages, where available, and has developed 'work-arounds' for situations where software is not available.

Date: March 2009
Subtitle Bitmaps solve the problem of Arabic in Encore CS4
Right to left causes subtitle problems

Amazing though this is to me, the new Adobe Encore CS4 DVD authring tool does not recognise right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. This makes it impossible to import text-based subtitle scripts in any language that uses the Arabic script, such as Dari, Farsi, Sorani etc. While my ghast is very flabbered by this omission in Adobe's software my task is to get the job done, not to whinge about the limitations of the software.

There are two solutions to this problem. We can use a different piece of DVD authoring software that does recognise these scripts, such as the very clunky DVDIT Pro, or we can use bitmaps (images), to create the subtitles. These can then be imported into Encore using an image script. Because the client in this project wanted to use Encore we adopted the latter approach in this case.

Date: Feb 2009
Tiger, Tiger burning bright, would you like a little bite?
Actually a leopard but I don't know any leopard poems .....

Adelphi specialises in typesetting the more exotic scripts. This project was an interesting variation on our usual business jobs. We were asked to typeset the book 'The Man-Eater of Punanai' by Christopher Ondaatje. This is the story of a small village in Ceylon where the locals were terrorised by a man eating leopard.

Adelphi were asked to translate and typeset the book in Sinhalese. Sinhalese uses an exotic and beautiful script which is not for the faint-hearted typesetter! Here is a small sample to make your eyes water....

Sinhalese typesetting The Tiger of Punanai

Date: Jan 2009
Adelphi start the New Year with a partnership merger
Adelphi chosen to carry on the work of Health & Housing

Health & Housing, the Leeds based specialist communications provider for community, health and housing professionals, and Adelphi Translations Ltd. have enjoyed a long standing working relationship over the past few years. Kelvin Sutcliffe who is Health & Housing’s Director will be taking early retirement and has decided to pass on the management of his customers to Adelphi Translations Ltd..

All Health & Housing customers will now be able to procure quality design, translation and print services directly from Adelphi.

Date: Nov 2008
More Multimedia Mandarin
Sheffield City Council Documentary

Adelphi flexed its multimedia muscles again combining sound recording and video editing to produce a Mandarin version of a documentary about listed buildings in Sheffield.

The project was for Sheffield City Council for a presentation in November and featured the famous, or some would say infamous, Park Hill Flats in Sheffield city centre.

Using our in-house video editing studio we can reauthor DVDs to include up to 16 subtitle or audio tracks and create a new menu based on the client graphics to allow selection of the available languages.

Date: Oct 2008
RBC Capital Markets Quick Turnaround
Business Information Italian to English

RBC came to Adelphi requesting a very quick turnaround of a large volume of business information that they required translating from Italian to English. Adelphi were able to complete this project quickly so that the information could be used by RBC. Consequently Adelph continue to work with RBC to translate correspondance and business reports for the company.

Date: September 2008
All you ever wanted to know about Freemasonry in France in the 30s
"Forces Occultes" DVD reauthoring with subtitles

We were approched by the University of Sheffield for this fascinating project, translating and reauthoring a film originally produced in France in the 1930s. The film was an anti-Masonry propaganda film and followed the misfortunes of a member of the French parliament who was enticed to join the Freemasonry movement only to become disillusioned by its self-seeking and power hungry machinations. According to the film the second World War was all their fault! The history may be dubious but the film is extraordinary in its claim to reveal much of the secret nature of the Freemasonry movement, including a re-eneactment of the notorious, and very silly, initiation ceremony.

Adelphi's skill in multimedia allowed us to reproduce this film onto DVD with English subtitles, working closely with the University's department of Masonic Studies to make sure all terminology was correct. The resulting film was shown in the Showroom cinema to an invited audience of academics and students in October.

Date: June 2008
Website in Korean and Chinese
Korean website localisationCryogenic Valves on the web

Creating an accurate copy of a website in a foreign language involves for more than simply translation.

The characters of a non-Latin script, such as Korean, need code to tell the browser which character-set to select in order to make sure the language displays correctly in all the major browsers (including the most popular Internet Explorer, the increasingly popular FireFox and safari for Mac).

Hyperlinks must be maintained, images localised and other media such as Flash movies and Javascript menus dealt with. Adelphi are one of the few multilingual translation agencies that have the in-house knowledge to handle all aspects of a website translation.

Date: June 2008
Manage our projects Viv!!
New multilingual project manager joins Adelphi

If you phone Adelphi the chances are that you will speak to our new Head Project Manager Vivian Yee.

Amazingly versatile, Viv is a fluent speaker of Cantonese, Malay and is not bad at English either. She is also the principle chocolate and biscuit provider for the office and drives us all mad by microwaving delicious Chinese food in the office and not offering us any!

Date: June 2008
Humanitarian Logistics
Web, Flash, Voice recordings - all on an interactive CD

This is a training manual in French for those involved in disaster relief. A combination of many media types in one package only an agency competant in all aspects of multimedia and languages could handle a project like this. Adelphi is one of the few that can.

Date: May 2008
Size doesn't matter, technical too
Technical translation for a leading computer network company

Adelphi don't shy away from highly technical subject matter. This one was a 260,000 word training course in German for one of the world's leading networking companies.

Date: April 2008
Trebro Combine Harvesters
80 page user manual in 6 languages

Combine Harvesters are large and dangerous machines! It's important to know what you are doing when zooming around a field in one of these monsters. It is, therefore, essential that manuals are translated accurately. If you speak Icelandic you can now handle this formidable piece of machinery in confidence thanks to Adelphi.

Date: March 2008
How not to catch a nasty disease in 20 languages
Nineteen different languages on the dangers of TB

Somali, Punjabi, Urdu, Polish Chinese and AlbanianTo promote the awareness of the dangers of TB to immigrants and other none English speakers. We translated and typeset 9 different leaflets into Albanian.

A juicy mixture of right-to-left languages and exotic fonts, such as Tamil, Adelphi is one of the few companies who can produce print-ready documents in all these languages.

Date: February 2008
Adelphi have gone CERTIFIED
We can now handle documents that need to be certified

Often, documents required for legal purposes such as business tenders, birth certificates, qualifications, marriage certificates etc., need to be certified after translation. Adelphi can now handle this kind of document using specially qualified translators.

Date: January 2008
Annual Reports in just one day.....
Repeat business for annual reports

Annual reports are time-critical so when we got repeat business from our client who needed a new 36 page Annual Report in German typeset in a hurry we flew into action! Did we beat the deadline? Oh yes. Eight hours after their order they had their pristine InDesign file back.

Date: December 2007
More Asylum Team work in the build-up to Christmas
Three Asylum teams

Birmingham, Barnsley and Scotland asylum teams all required new translation and typesetting in the usual gamut of languages including Urdu.

One project was a 'Welcome pack' for young people arriving in the Midlands from numerous countries. The pack had to be written in very clear language to help the young people settle down to their new lives in the UK.

Date: November 2007
Korean Technical Website
Adding to the Korean Internet Addiction ....

Korea is one of the most technically advance nations on Earth when it comes to Internet connection and use with 70% of the population of 45 million going online regularly. This is the second highest percentage in the world (after Iceland). They also have almost universal Intenet coverage. An amazing 80% of households have a high-speed internet connection. In the U.S., the figure is only 35%, the UK around 50%.

Adelphi have recently translated an English engineering website into Chinese for a company exporting Needle valves, Manula Globe Valves, Swing check valves ... errr, no I don't know what these are either but our technical Korean and Chinese translators do!

Date: October 2007
Occassionally we do English too
Sound recording in English

It's not all foreign langages here at Adelphi. Because we have own own recording facilities here we can also record in English too.

This job was for a training video for airport security scanners. Although I get a little tired of the Government telling us how scared to be there must have been quite a boom in the scanning business! So the next time you suffer a full body search at the airport for trying to 'smuggle' on a bottle of baby milk and a pair of nail clippers maybe yu can blame us for helping to train the airport security staff to such a high standard :-)

Date: September 2007
Adelphi visit Poland for the first time ....
From Sheffield to Krakow

Nigel & Steve took a business trip to Krakow to meet with one of our associate companies. The weather was perfect, the city is beautiful and the meeting with Andrejz of Lido-Lang went very well. The Vodka is cheap and Krakow is highly recommended by N&S for a city break.

Date: August 2007
Daisy, Daisy give me your CD do ....
Adelphi branch out to handle Daisy CDs

As part of a larger job involving the usual translation and typesetting we were asked to produce Daisy CDs. The Daisy format is a new way to present written material to visually impaired people. The resulting CDs are played in special players and can be Type 2 (Audio only) or Type 4 (Audio and text). Daisy CDs allow places in the file to be bookmarked and for audio books to be divided into chapters and pages.

Technically they are based on the XML format SMIL (pronounced SMILE!) which allows mutimedia files to be combined into a single display with, for example, visual text synchronised with written text. The XML files are combined with audio and regular HTML files to produce the finished Daisy book.

Date: July 2007
Welcome to Adelphi Emma-Jane and James
Do you want the GOOD NEWS or the BAD NEWS first?

Bad news? OK, Jennifer, who has been with us for two years, has decided to move on to pastures new.

And the "Good News", I hear you cry? Well, we have been joined by Emma-Jane (Project Management) and James Seawell (Sales & Marketing) who started this week!!! That's James on the right.

Huzzah!!! (as Jenners would say).

Date: June 2007
Escape from Glasgow!

Steve and Nigel returned from a successful meeting with a large Government agency in Glasgow.......

....fortunately one day before the terrorist attack on the airport entrance! Phew!.......

We will be providing translation and typesetting services in many languages for the minority communities in Glasgow.

Date: May 2007
Sit up straight and eat your greens!

Steve now considers himself an expert in the potentially crippling desease, osteoporosis, or brittle bone disease, after producing the foreign language soundtrack and subtitles for an educational DVD on the subject.

Adelphi used the original DVCam tape to re-create the DVD with the additional language commentaries and subtitles and produced a menu from the client's design, to navigate the DVD, using Adobe Premier, Adobe Encore and Subtitle Workshop. The tricky part was matching the timing to the English original as most languages expand from English. So some judicious editing was required for both the audio and subtitles to make them fit. SoundForge was used to edit the sound files.

Hungarian

Date: May 2007
Sound recording, translation and XML file translation in seven languages

This was a big one!..... involving the translation of hundreds of XML files which were being pulled into Flash movies, and the recording of 138 segments as individual files for the sound component of an online sales training system.

The client was sent a range of voice samples from which they could chose their preferred voice and all the recordings were made in Adelphi's own digital studio. These files were then converted to MP3s with a Variable Bit Rate 32 - 64kbps in mono.

Hungarian

Date: May 2007
The Forum Federation 180 pages in Kurdish Sorani

Using an original Arabic document we typeset a 180 page booklet in Kurdish Sorani, using InDesign ME. There was no original English document to work from. Fortunately, our wealth of talent here at Adelphi includes Ali, who reads both Sorani and Arabic fluently!

Sorani

Date: May 2007
Typesetting Annual Reports in Eight Languages

More Annual Report Typesetting for Rio Tinto for the design agency FLAG

The most interesting language in this particular job was Mongolian. This language is now written using the Cyrillic script, like Russian, but with added letters which don't appear in any other language. The original Mongolian script ran in vertical columns running from top to bottom. The Mongolians have also had to put up with their language being written in Chinese characters, Arabic and Tibetan script. In 1931 the language had a brief flirtation with the Latin script before settling on Cyrillic six years later.

Turkish

Date: April 2007
Right-to-Left for CILT, the National Centre for Languages

Adelphi Translations Ltd. are experts at typesetting right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Urdu.

We are currently involved typesetting an eight page curriculum guide in to Arabic and Urdu using InDesign ME. CILT is the Government’s recognised centre of expertise on languages and exists to promote a greater capability in languages amongst all sectors of the UK population.

The tricky thing about right-to-left language typesetting is the inclusion of bits of left-to-right, usually in the form of English names or numbers. This causes the software to have to juggle the right-to-left and left-to-right algorithms controlling the text flow. If you have ever tried to edit this kind of mixed text you will appreciate the hair-ripping frustration of trying to get full-stops, brackets, quotation marks and other punctuation to place correctly. They have the nasty habit of zipping off to the beginning of the sentence, or is that the end of the sentence?.... even the simple matter of inserting a space enters a whole new realm of complexity and irritation! So don't do it! Leave it to us....

Urdu

Date: March 2007
Lust in Translation - a guide to cheap and nasty subtitles for movies

It seems that film companies are cutting corners when it comes to subtitling their blockbusters "with hilarious consequences", as the man with the very deep voice on the trailers might say.

As we know, in the translation business, it is always possible to get Very Cheap But Nasty by outsourcing to dubious agencies - it seems that subtitles are suffering from the Cheap & Nasty syndrome too. Subtitling is increasingly being sent out to such agencies in Malaysia and India where the subtitles get so badly mangled they make no sense at all.

Here are a few of the most entertaining examples from Monday's Times newspaper.

"She died in a freak rugby accident" became
"She died in a rugby match for people with deformities"

"Jim is a Vietnam vet" became
"Jim is a veterinarian from Vietnam"

"We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment" became
"We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment"

Although it's great fun to mock terrible translations there is a serious point to be made as companies look at the bottom line rather than the quality of the work. Of course, we can get translations done for £40 per thousand, but the chances are it will be awful and will be rejected by the client, need correcting or even re-translating and the final costs will be higher. Using cheap translators can lead to such baffling sentences as.....

"New laser cutting and engraving technology for shuttle machines" being translated as "New laser guts and engraving technology for Boat embroidery machines."

Moto: cheap can often mean nasty!

Date: March 2007
Annual report translation leads to crazy March

Translation of Annual Reports Company Annual Reports are a specialist area of translation which Adelphi are adept in. We are currently producing reports into English from German and French. Because we have our own in-house multilingual typesetting facility we can ease your load by producing a print-ready document.

Both the current reports we are working on are being produced in Adobe InDesign CS2, more evidence that Adobe have made inroads into the previous near-monopoly of QuarkXpress. We are lucky to have Steve Q, a local InDesign guru and trainer joining our freelance typesetting staff.

Director Nigel used to work for IBI in Tokyo, the largest producer of annual reports in Japan, so he understands the business and the 'end-of-year panic' which consumes such companies and the necessity of meeting tight deadlines by burning the midnight oil! During the annual report production frenzy we lock our doors and staff are not allowed to leave until the job is finished!!!

Date: March 2007
We also are into the English also being translating cumpany ... PARDON????

Translations into English

Although the majority of our translation work is from English into the world's other languages we also 'go the other way' into English. Many non-English companies entrust their website English copy to their employees with 'hilarious consequences'.

The following example is from a site that wished to exchange links with us. If you can make any sense of this please write in, on a postcard .....

The xxxx xxxx xxxx Co. lives forever the screw factory is that one produces the hardware & tools screw, and various kinds of fasteners are producers of the main fact, founding the factory so far for 5 years, cover an area of 3000 square meters, 50 staff are names, the output value of annual sales volume 500 million, is official working , production environment, compound the advanced production equipment and accurate machines, a number of projects induces the technical staff and enterprise managerial talent.

Date: February 2007
Phew! That was a busy one .....

Record month from Adelphi Translations Ltd.

Adelphi are celebrating their most successful month to date (loud popping of champagne corks in background) .... and we have also now managed to hit top spot in Google with a few choice phrases such as "Hindi Typesetting", "Farsi Typesetting" etc. Also "Foreign Language typesetting" places us in fourth place. Hitting the higher spots in Google with any generic phrase is difficult so we are quite pleased with this.

We are now working on more useful services for our website visitors, such as free machine translation and language advice.

Date: February 2007
XLIFF files - we can handle them!

Being very tech-savvy here at Adelphi we have no problem handling the latest file formats including XML derivatives such as XLIFF.

XLIFF is the XML Localization Interchange File Format which is used to exchange translation data (mainly the text to be translated) between different file formats. The text is extracted from the original format such as MS Word, Adobe InDesign, HTML etc and is held in an XLIFF file which can then be loaded into an XLIFF translator. After translation the XLIFF file contents are converted back to the original file format.

So XLIFF is basically an intermediate format which allows the translator to concentrate on the text without worrying about the original format. XLIFF also holds metadata which can assist the localisation process such as the document encoding, source and target languages and origination of documents.

It looks like this in case you were wondering -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<file datatype="xml" original="FIROBTextWord.xml" source-language="en-GB" target-language="da-DK">
<header>
<phase-group>
<phase company-name="XYZ Limited" contact-email="alf.tatlock@arrgh.com" contact-name="Alf Tatlock " date="24 January 2007"/>
</phase-group>

<count count-type="total">367</count>
</header>

<body>
<trans-unit approved="no" id="LF3-ID0TG0A">
<source xml:lang="en-GB">

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or media or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of BLAH, Inc.</source>
<target state="needs-review-translation" xml:lang="da-DK">No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or media or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of BLAH, Inc.
</target>
</trans-unit>

<trans-unit approved="no" id="LF3-ID0TJ0A">
<source xml:lang="en-GB">
For the statements below, choose the answer which best applies to you.</source>
<target state="needs-review-translation" xml:lang="da-DK">For the statements below, choose the answer which best applies to you.</target>

</trans-unit>

In this case the target language is Danish.

Date: January 2007
We are all concerned about food safety : in Spain, China, Portugal and Italy at least....

Another recording job for the new year - very topical.

Having come back from Manila with Asian Bird Flu (OK maybe not, but it felt like it) it was interesting to be involved in a DVD soundtrack explaining the role of food laboratories in protecting us all from Salmonella, Listeria, E.Coli and other nasties which can make us ill. We used our local voice talent in Portuguese, both male and female. Careful what you eat now.... sticking to crisps and deep-fried Mars bars MAY be the healthy option.

Date: December 2006
The Chinese tourist discovers the East Midlands

Adelphi recently translated and typeset a brochure for the East Midlands tourist board in Chinese.

We used two of our regular Chinese translators and got the following comment from the client.....

“Thought you'd like to know we have received very positive comments on the Mandarin translation from our client…..

I am pleased to receive the translated Mandarin version of the tourism brochure. The quality of translation is among the best I have seen while working for the China Bureau. It has achieved accuracy while being able to keep the style and flavour of the original literature. I'm sure the targeted Chinese readers would get the message.”

You can see the full PDF (867Kb) here if you want to visit the East Midlands.... oh, and you read Chinese!

Chinese

Date: December 2006
The Workstation Christmas Party - big fun had by all....

Our office complex, the Workstation in Sheffield, held their Xmas party on the 1st of December.

Adelphi were there in force - represented by the regular guys in the office plus our regular local translators and project managers. A big thank you to Nathalie, Ana, JiaJia, Paul and Vivien for turning up and proving to the other companies in the Workstation that we DO have friends after all!

Date: December 2006
I'll take the money - in any language!

Adelphi have lots of experience with financial and economic translations.

In the last few shopping days until Christmas we have been inundated with a huge volume of German to English text (around 150,000 words). We won't give you the name of the bank concerned but if you contemplate the words 'German' and 'Bank' you may be able to work it out ;-)

The tricky part of this job is that the text was supplied in hundreds of scanned PDFs - the documents contained no 'live' text at all. This is usually a nightmare to word-count but we do have the latest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which makes light work of turning text 'images' into live text that can be counted and edited.

This software is not perfect but is a great help in providing word-counts in such documents. The only other way to do it would be to force some poor person to sit down and do a manual count (you didn't really want Xmas day off did you Jennifer???)

Date: November 2006
Bonjour, Bonjour, Bonjour!! What's all this then?

Adelphi do quite a lot of work for the Police Force - including, this month, a crime-prevention leaflet for Leicestershire constabulary.


This was a typesetting and translation job for a full-colour leaflet to improve personal safety created in Adobe InDesign, which is rapidly catching up to QuarkXpress as the professional tool for creating documents for print. Here at Adelphi we have the latest versions of InDesign and QuarkXpress and the ME (Middle Eastern) version of Indesign which allows us to work directly on right-to-left scripts such as those used for Dari etc.....

Polish

Date: November 2006
CHRISTMAS HAS BEEN CANCELLED

Woah - here comes the Christmas rush at Adelphi!!!

The staff at Adelphi have been a little disappointed by the complete cancellation of Xmas by the scrooge-like bosses, as Adelphi are snowed-under by work leading up to the holidays. Who says it won't be a white Christmas? The Christmas party will now probably be in January ;-)

ADELPHI WISHES ALL ITS TRANSLATORS, PARTNERS and CLIENTS a MERRY XMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!! - just keep working!

Date: November 2006
Cushion the blow with a donkey .....

I couldn't resist posting this cautionary tale of the perils of non-proofed translations as heard on BBC Radio 4 last night and repeated on the site www.theherald.co.uk.

A Strathclyde Fire & Rescue leaflet has been withdrawn after the admirable decision to translate it into Urdu went slightly awry. The English version has key points on fire safety in the home which includes:

"Never jump straight out of a window; lower yourself on to cushions etc." The translated version reads as "Never jump out of a window straight. Put yourself on a donkey etc and come down." The Urdu words for cushion and donkey are very similar.

As we are currently involved in a 140 page booklet into Urdu speakers. We believe he knows the difference between a cushion and a donkey but I'll be calling him shortly to make sure ...

Date: October 2006
XML? What the XML is it ...??

This month we completed a translation of XML files for an International car company into German. Here at Adelphi we can handle XML files directly without endangering the mark-up. So what is this mysterious format?

XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information. A markup language is a mechanism to identify structures in a document. It looks a bit like HTML for the web developers amongst you but XML allows you to invent your own tags to describe the contents of the document. So whereas HTML has <H1> to describe a heading in a document but is purely for display, in XML the tag may read <invoice_number> or <full_name> and describes the actual content.

XML is really just plain text but care has to be taken when editing or translation text within the elements of the XML file. Unlike HTML, one accidentally erased bracket will cause the whole file to fail!!

At Adelphi we use sophisticated software to hide the mark-up tags from the translators so that no accidental damage can be done to the file during the translation process. Steve also has extensive experience with XML, having trained the subject for a number of years, so any encoding problems or 'accidents' can be rectified in-house.

So if you have any XML files to translate you can be confident that Adelphi can deliver undamaged XML back to you or your client.

German

Date: October 2006
"BARNSLEY ASYLUM SEEKERS WEBSITE LAUNCH "

The launch went superbly well - the Mayor of Barnsley launched the Asylum Seekers' website with the click of a mouse - the guest speaker was BBC presenter and local poet Ian Macmillan....

Adelphi TRanslations webiste translation for Barnsley

You can see the site French

Date: October 2006
"I ROBOT.......... ME TRANSLATE RUBBISH!!!"

We recently went along to a local web-design company who had, what seemed to them, a fantastic idea!... they wanted to set up an online system which would translate their clients' websites "at the push of a button"....

Sadly, or actually, fortunately for us ;-), Machine Translation is not yet at the stage where it can replace human translators. Coincidentally today, 26th October 2006, the BBC ran an article on its website on this very subject, with lots of hilarious examples - check it out below.....

The BBC article of the hilarious consequences of Machine Translation

Date: October 2006
On Ilkley Moor baht 'at....... Barnsley Asylum Team on-line innovation

Being Barnsley lads both Nigel & Steve are very happy to be helping Barnsley Asylum Team with an innovative project in eight languages. In a Local Authority 'first' - Barnsley are creating a website available to asylum seekers in the area as well as providing advice to their support teams.

The site will be launched this month in English, at an event which will be attended by the Mayor of Barnsley and Barnsley Poet and radio star, Ian Macmillan (who, bizarrely, was the drummer in Steve's folk-rock band in the 70s!!). The foreign languages versions will be rolled out over the next month or so using a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) which can handle the foreign language scripts, including the right-to-left languages Dari.

The Barnsley team are rightly proud of their efforts in being the first to provide such a comprehensive and user friendly service and hope it will be copied by local authorities througout the land.

Lithuanian

Date: September 2006
Need to glaze your cab? Then you've come to the right place!

Netflare Design Agency asked us to translate one of their client's sites into German, French and Dutch. The site is now live at www.cabglazing.com It's a good example of a company providing a much more user-friendly interface for their foreign customers rather than assuming that the whole of Europe is happy to use English for business..... and shouting louder doesn't help either!

Dutch

Date: September 2006
It's NOT all Greek to us

Recently we have had a spate of recording work of the 'For Korean please press 2' kind. Soon the dulcid tones of our native speakers will be heard speaking in Spanish on telephones all over the world :-) All our recording work is done in our very large (and somewhat spooky) basement studio using digital equipment and can be converted to any sound file format such as MP3 or WAV at whatever bit rate and sample rate you require.

Russian

Date: September 2006
Urdu something to me .....

Urdu is one of our specialist languages and we have recently taken on a 140 page booklet on Mental Health, translation and typesetting, for Bradford Council. This has been typeset in QuarkXpress to be ready to print. On jobs like this we agree a style sheet with the client before the translation takes place, covering such topics as: will proper nouns be translated? How shall we deal with acronyms? Where shall we translate terms or names and where shall we transliterate them or, indeed, leave them in English?

When all these details have been agreed the consistency and quality of the final product will be overseen by our in-house native speakers; in this case our favourite Urdu specialist Shaheed, who will check translation, layout and create an index for the booklet.

Urdu

Date: August 2006
Adelphi expand by 100% .... look out world.....

We are happy to announce that we have just taken on two full-time employees.
Jennifer (Costelloe), who has been with us on a part-time basis for many months, finally became available to go full-time in August (and promptly went on two weeks holiday, hey ho...) but is now our head Project-Manager and resident aide-memoire (basically, she is the one who remembers stuff...) Jennifer is usually the one who answers the phone so now you can put a face to the voice. She has recently decided to start learning Russian for reasons we can't fathom but we wish her luck with this - she already speaks pretty good Swedish and her English is coming along nicely (well, she is from Essex ;-)

Jenny has been joined by Wai-Seen Cartwright as sales manager. Wai-Seen is of Chinese-Malaysian origin and speaks Malay, Cantonese and (of course) brilliant English. If you are struggling with the pronunciation of her name "Why Seen" is the closest equivalent in English.

We welcome the ladies to Adelphi as full-timers and hope they can put up with the two resident Grumpy Old Men, otherwise known as Steve & Nigel.

Date: July 2006
"You are number 768 in the queue, but your call IS important to us"... (in any language)

More recording work; this time for an American company needing phrases for a call management system in Spanish.

Some consternation was caused when it was pointed out that you can't just take disjointed English phrases, translate them into other languages, and expect them to make sense when they are glued back together in the same order as the English. Hmmmm .... but with Adelphi's expert language consultation the project was successfully competed. Unfortunately you would have to fly to Germany, Israel or Spain to hear the final product.

Russian

Date: June 2006
And this week's guest publication is ..... "LOOKING UP"

Since January Adelphi have been localising the technical monthly "LOOKING UP", the magazine for the Crane industry. The magazine is published in Chinese, including the monthly adventures of CRANE MAN! China is in the middle of a development boom and the cities of China are a growing market for crane manufacturers. Mind you, from our top storey office here is Sheffield we can see an amazing number of cranes too! Sheffield may be the Beijing of Yorkshire :-)


Date: June 2006
Samtext of Norway asks, "You say you do ALL languages?"

At Adelphi we pride ourselves on being able to handle almost all languages, including typesetting and recording them. For SAMTEXT of Norway we are handling a project in Nepalese. The Amharic script is particularly unusual - here's a little example:

Burmese

Date: May 2006
WHAM BRANDS ..... thank you Ma'am

Adelphi have just localised an iWork presentation for Wham Brands, a corporate branding company which is part of the Hutchinson Whampole group, who were making a high level pitch to a large China's largest listed telecommunications equipment provider. The presentation had to be examined to make sure the snappy 'Sales-speak' translated effectively into another language and didn't leave ZTE's top brass in a state of confusion! iWorks is an application for Apple Mac computers with a similar role to Microsoft PowerPoint for PC.


Date: May 2006
Betting Site goes Live .....

The site we localised in April has now gone live at http://www.finansbet.com/
Click on 'Languages' to see our work. Now you can lose (or make) money in four languages!

Norwegian

Date: April 2006
Smells good in French too.....

Most translations we do are technical documents but occasionally something a little more unusual comes along. The Ormonde Jayne Perfume Collection was just such a job providing our French translator with artistic challenges such as 'The marriage of these elements, together with a dusky floral heart of sampaquita absolute, freesia and muguet, combine to form a fusillade of fabulous intensity.' I'm sure it smells fabulous in any language!

Date: April 2006
We go the other way too ..... into English!

Most of our work is from English into the target language but we find ourselves doing more and more work into English - recently from Swedish was a Psychometric questionnaire which had to go from English to Swedish and back again, in order to check that the nuances of the questions had not been 'lost in translation'.

Date: April 2006
Fancy a flutter in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish?

The online 'Spread Betting' site 'Capital Spreads' are expanding into Scandinavia and have asked Adelphi to localise their website into Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The site is still under construction but I'll post a link to the translated sites when they go live.

Norwegian

Date: April 2006
Website in Spanish Por Favor!

Adelphi have recently localised the 'Symphony Event Management Software' website into Spanish. Take a look at the end result here. (Opens a new window)

Spanish

Date: March 2006
Happy Birthday Adelphi

Adelphi have just celebrated their first full year trading under their new name .... any excuse for a celebration! Thanks to everyone who came along to our gathering at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield and the Pizza to follow. Lots of languages were represented but the lingua-franca was, fortunately for us, ENGLISH! Hope to see you all again at our next bash.......

Date: March 2006
Community languages galore

Adelphi have just received commissions from a new partner to translate and typeset a series of documents including "Welcome to Glasgow" for asylum seekers in the following languages:

Punjabi.

Date: February 2006
IMP GROUP (Packaging) 14 language film script for DVD

Our fourth job for this particular client - a sound track for a Health & Safety DVD in fourteen languages. Previous projects have included technical translations.

The languages involved are: Seychelles Creole

Date: January 2006
BARNSLEY COUNCIL ASYLUM TEAM 140 page brochure

BARNSLEY COUNCIL have just place an order with us for the design, production and translation of a 140 page brochure aimed at Asylum seekers.

The languages involved are: Polish.

Date: January 2006
Questionnaires for TESCO in 14 languages

TESCO have returned to Adelphi to have a series of questionnaires translated for their internal staff survey.
The languages for this project were Croatian

We have since received this email from their Marketing Manager Laura Harrison:

...thanks very much for all the work you've done for us, and for your patience with the various quote changes and file delays! We have had very positive feedback so far on the provision and range of foreign language questionnaires.

I have recommended your services to the agency I work with on this job, should they require any translation work, and I will be in touch again next year!
 
Date: December 2005
Every language of the European Union please!
NO PROBLEM!

TNT have asked Adelphi to localise an 'Employment Motivation Survey' questionnaire into every official language of the European Union.

In case you are not sure what these are here is a list ;-)
Click on the language name to learn more about it.

Slovene

 
Date: November 2005
Adelphi finish 100+ language project for GlobalSight

Adelphi are celebrating the completion of a three year project for GlobalSight, one of the UK's top localisation companies.

The project involved creating brochures, onserts and advertisements for almost every country in the world, in over 120 languages, for GlobalSight's client Philip Morris International.

Date: November 2005
Typesetting in Welsh for Barclays Bank

Adelphi have just been awarded a contract to localise Barclays' product information materials into Welsh.

This follows on from an audio recording of the material in Welsh, completed last month. Steve, who made the high-quality digital recordings in-house in Adelphi's own studio, listened to so much Welsh that he can now say 'Car Insurance' in the language. Very useful.

Date: November 2005
Adelphi translate for D&AD
Adelphi are now providing regular translations into Word and PowerPoint formats for D&AD, a UK-based educational charity working on behalf of the international design and advertising communities.
 
Date: November 2005
Typesetting for AXA
AXA (insurance and asset management) are using Adelphi to localise a series of International Health Plan Handbooks into eight European languages, including Swedish.
 
Date: October 2005
Dudley College Website
The Dudley College website has recently been localised by Adelphi (working with Birmingham Chamber of Commerce) into six languages including Spanish.
 
Date: October 2005
Jamie Oliver Calendar for Sainsbury's goes to Adelphi

We have just translated and typeset the new Sainsbury's Jamie Oliver calendar for 2006 into Dutch. We had to source the National Holidays for the two countries and make sure the recipes were comprehensible. We didn't want to be responsible for any culinary disasters!

 
Tel: +44(0)114 272 3772
Email: info@adelphitranslations.com
NEWS INDEX
Oct 05
Nov 05
Dec 05
Jan 06
Feb 06
March 06
April 06
May 06
June 06
July 06
Aug 06
Sept 06
Oct 06
Nov 06
Dec 06
Jan 07
Feb 07
March 07
April 07
May 07
June 07
July 07
Aug 07
Sept 07
Oct 07
Nov 07
Dec 07
Jan 08
Feb 08
March 08
April 08
May 08
June 08
July 08
August 08
September 08
October 08
November 08
December 08
January 09
February 09
March 09
April 09
May 09
June 09
July 09
August 09
September 09
October 09
November 09
December 09
January 2010
Translations in any language
Foreign Language Typesetting
Websites in any language
Voice recordings for film or audio
Design and Print in foreign languages
Subtitles for film
Interpretation by phone
Multimedia in any language
Braille
.............................
See our foreign language portfolios
View Typesetting Portfolio Typesetting
View Websites Portfolio Websites
Listen to Voice Samples Design
.............................
Certified Translations for legal documents
Certified Translations
Learn more .....

···························································································································································