This unit assists its clients to overcome linguistic barriers by facilitating the communication with other partners. The personnel include multilingualism to all stages of the information cycle, including content generation, classification and summarization of the meaning embodied in the text to be translated. The department specializes in English and French languages. Furthermore, the unit offers professional transcription services of focus groups, interviews, seminars, presentations, meetings, and corporate events. Transcription means recording in writing an audio sounds contained on a cassette. Another expectation of the transcription process is to listen to the original media in a different language, then transcribe and translate it into another language.

The unit also conducts trainings in professional translation process. The need for commercial translation is growing rapidly in an age of globalization. Every multinational company and organization uses translation services. Much of the translation currently being undertaken in corporate settings, where the demand for translation is growing most rapidly, is being accomplished by untrained bilingual employees. Without training in what translation really implies, these individuals can actually create more problems than they solve. The emerging language industry is sorely in need of “best practices – standards of excellence which can assist in communications process. Our professional translators also provide intensive coaching in the professional standards of translation. Companies are finding that the cost of not translating poses too great a risk to international trades. Translation is one of the fastest growing professions today, as different languages and cultures are coming closer together either for business transactions, for diplomacy and world peace or for any other reasons.

There are higher expectations of technical expertise for the modern-day translator. Often, the translator’s ability to use the computer-related tools is as important as his ability to translate in the first place. To do this effectively, basic technical knowledge is essential. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundation in the theory, practice, and ethics of translation. Translation involves two basic skills: ability to read the source language and ability to write in the target language. Mediating between those two skills is what might be called translation judgment. Specifically, the foundation course will address the history of translation; types of translation; translation ethics; and the business of translation. Students will develop translation judgment first by learning how to analyze texts in the source language. This course will also an overview of the nature of legal translation. Because a legal document, when executed, bears legal liabilities, the translation of a legal document usually has the same legal effect as the original. As a result, there are high requirements for accuracy in legal translation in meaning, tone, and style The characteristics of legal translation in general will also be discussed. This course will also cover the different areas of legal translation: corporate, litigation, intellectual property, and tax. Their respective features in translation will be reviewed. This course will give an overview of the different bases of legal systems and how to research legal issues in the countries of the various language pairs. Finally, it is important for the translator to understand cultural and linguistic differences that shade meaning in a legal text.

Finally, students will be expected to develop an understanding of the terminology and concepts most often encountered in business and financial translations and will be encouraged to read the financial press daily to aid in this process. Students will be required to develop a language-specific glossary of terms, indicating their usage in various contexts, based on the course readings and assignments and any research they do to complete the assignments. Students will also be expected to hone their terminology research skills. This is particularly important for the ever-evolving terminology of finance and investment banking, as this terminology is rarely found in bilingual sources. Students will also be taught to seek and evaluate target language parallel documents for their translations whenever possible and will be asked to share these documents with their practicum colleagues and their instructor. Some of the topics to be covered in this course are letters of credit, securities issues and markets, various forms of debt, and annual reports. This training is not designed to assist participants in improving their language ability. It is assumed that participants are fluent and understand both language pairs. The training is intended to assist bilinguals to improve their ability to translate effectively.

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