A discussion about translation services, translators, and translation software

When is a job too small to merit concern for a high-quality translation?  Never.  Even when you are just asking a bilingual friend or associate to do the work, then ask another bilingual friend or associate to review it for quality. 

As a dad of youngsters, I recently got an advertisement (flyer) from a local baseball league for youth, Matt Williams Baseball of Mesa and Chandler, Arizona.  Not exactly international material, but at least they were sufficiently aware of their potential clientele to offer a Spanish translation of their ad on the reverse.  And it's a good one!  Oh, there are orthographic errors--faulty capitalization in titles--and such that I would have gigged them for as a college instructor of Spanish grammar, but the quality is certainly better than might be expected at this level.  I called a league official and was told that the translation was done by one of the coaches.  I say he also has a future as a translator.  Check out his handling of "Fees are date-sensitive!"  He wrote, very appropriately, "Fechas con vencimiento".  You gotta like that.  And he handled the baseball terminology very well, too.

 Never assume that all is well just because it looks foreign enough and you can't make sense of it anyway.  Even local youth baseball leagues can suffer hugely if a really rotten translation leads to embarrassment, bad publicity, or estrangement of elements of the community.