In an increasingly globalized world, organizations have come to rely on professional translators to facilitate communication. With native Spanish speakers now outnumbering native English speakers globally (437 million to 360 million), you may want to broaden your organization’s reach through professional Spanish translation of your website, print materials, or other content. Contact us to learn more about our Spanish translation services.
Although both Spanish and English are derived from Latin, differences in grammar, punctuation, and syntax can make translating between the languages especially tricky. Here are three challenges you should ensure your Spanish translation service is equipped to handle.
Quality checks
Just one small error can drastically change the meaning of your content. For example, non-native speakers have a tendency to misplace accents and tildes in Spanish, sometimes with embarrassing results. Forget to put the tilde in año (year), for example, and you’ll be saying something quite different.
A single letter, too, can mean the difference between saying “fish” (pescado) and “sin” (pecado), or saying “tired” (cansado) and “married” (casado). Even worse, don’t confuse remara (t-shirt) and ramera (sex worker)—especially if you’re translating for, say, a clothing boutique.
That’s why an experienced Spanish translation service will perform quality checks to catch these types of errors.
Mastery of grammar
Many readers know that Spanish and English can sound very similar, and that some words are even spelled identically. This is not surprising—Spanish is derived from Latin, and English is influenced by Latin, too. However, Spanish and English have very different grammar and punctuation.
Both Spanish and English use a subject-verb-object word order, but Spanish allows for much greater flexibility than English. Spanish-to-English translators must bear this in mind to avoid issues of non-standard syntax.
Spanish dialect exposure
Spanish is spoken in mainly ten different dialects around the world, four of which are spoken within Spain alone. Castilian, which is spoken in northern and central Spain, is sometimes thought of as the original Spanish and is most commonly used in print. It is viewed by Latin American Spanish speakers much the same as Americans might view British English.
In Mexican Spanish, you’ll find many loanwords from English due to Mexico’s close proximity to America. For example, for Mexican Spanish speakers, a computer is computadora, but for Spaniards, it’s ordenador.
In addition to Castilian and Mexican Spanish, other examples of Spanish dialects include Andalusian (spoken in Southern Spain), Canarian (spoken in the Canary Islands), and Caribbean Spanish.
A professional Spanish translation service will understand the different Spanish dialects and employ translators who can translate them correctly both to and from English.
Hire an experienced Spanish translator
If you are seeking professional Spanish translation services, please get in touch with TranslationServices.com. Our team of translators are fluent in a variety of Spanish dialects and have the experience to handle your translation needs.