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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cryogenic 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

To 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 :-)

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.

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.

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).

....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.

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

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

Sorani

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

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

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!

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!!!

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.

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

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.

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

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???)

Polish

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 ...

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

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....

You can see the site French

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

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

Dutch

Russian

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

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.

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

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 :-)

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

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.

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

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!

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'.

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

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

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.......

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.

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

The languages involved are: Polish.

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.

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

Slovene

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.

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.

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!