Translation Services

Professional Translations for Multilingual Messaging

As a professional translation services agency, we understand that a lot goes into a final written and translated product. Official translation services are crucial to the integrity of the messaging. The amount of behind-the-scenes work that goes into a translation helps the messaging resonate with limited English proficient communities – a reason why you shouldn’t use Google Translate and other automated translations that cannot be fully implemented into document translations. If you are ready to get started on translation services for documents, or if you simply have a question, we would be happy to start a conversation with you.

How to Identify Vital Documents for Translations

If you’re in a highly-regulated industry, each organization has its own requirements for threshold languages. Threshold languages are those that you must translate documents into based on the local communities. If you’re working with a client who doesn’t fall into threshold languages, you’ll still need to provide language access to accommodate the individual.

According to the California DOJ, a document is vital “if it contains information that is critical for obtaining services or providing awareness of rights, or is required by law.” For translation purposes, the DOJ has specifically defined the following documents as vital in legal settings:

1. Outreach materials regarding legal rights and obligations
2. Information regarding language access services
3. Language access complaint forms and procedures
4. Written notices of rights and responsibilities
5. Letters requiring an LEP person to respond
6. Information on court websites

These guidelines should help you determine if something is considered vital.

Translation Services for Culturally and Appropriate Services

To provide meaningful translation services for diverse audiences, your organization can work with a language service provider for the most effective messaging.

By providing messaging that is more culturally and linguistically appropriate, it will be more effective, understandable, respectful, and equitable. These types of culturally and linguistically appropriate services (CLAS) are therefore more responsive to diversity. These translations are curated for the diversity of different cultures, and consider practices, preferred languages, health literacy, and other communication needs (CLAS Standards).

The CLAS Standards emphasize the importance of being both culturally and linguistically appropriate in your services, and while these two are separate, they need to be reviewed and function together. Since culture and language include such a diverse array of possibilities, change over time, and are highly nuanced, it’s best to partner with a language service provider (LSP) to get it right. An LSP will help you target your messaging for the audiences that best match your organization. An LSP will also have the network capabilities to fully employ people with the relevant skill set, experience, and cultural understanding to provide meaningful messages that resonate with your target audiences.

Translation Services that Mask Sensitive Information

Avantpage uses Translation Memory to save every segment of repeated text strings that are approved. When you request for a project, the fille goes through our software and repeated text is identified. By re-using text that has already been translated like in these segments, our clients save time, money, and increase consistencies.

5 Steps through AvantShield: Our proprietary technology, AvantShield, identified the sensitive information in a file to code it before it is sent to the translation team. This text is replaced by a tag to show the linguists what type of data is hidden. This helps a translator to ensure no context is lost during this stage of the process. Next, the file is sent through AvantFlow. Translated segments go through an approval process by our editors and proofreaders. In the last stage, the previously-masked information is restored, again through AvantShield.

Protected information that needs to be destroyed happens once the full project is closed and the client has received all needed files. AvantShield permanently removes any protected and sensitive information, but the translation memory remains to preserve context for future reference.

The main reason for our clients to use AvantShield is to protect their sensitive information such as in cases of HIPAA. This allows our linguists to produce in-context, culturally-relevant translations without access to sensitive information. Before AvantShield, some clients would remove the information manually, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and unnecessary. With the help of our program, we can help our clients remain HIPAA compliant, while increasing consistencies, shortening delivery cycles, and saving money.