Translation triumph on ProZ.com!
We are proud to announce that at the end of last year two of Odista’s translators took first place in a translation competition organised by ProZ.com. ProZ.com is by far the largest Internet portal for translators and interpreters and has for nine years now organised an annual contest in which translators have to translate a given text from English into their mother tongue. The finished translations are then rated by colleagues working in the same language combination, who vote contestants through to a shortlist of finalists and then select an overall winner (see details).
Entries were of a high standard, each translator finding one or two unique solutions to particular translation dilemmas. Ultimately the choice had to fall on the one translation which not only best communicated the meaning of the text but also did so with the greatest regard for Serbian grammar and style. This honour went to the translation submitted by Odista’s pair, which took almost 80% more votes than the second-placed candidate!
An interesting thing to note is that although the rules allowed translators to work as a pair, we were the only entrants to take up this opportunity, which we are sure had an impact on the result. In our everyday work, we will not send a translation from Serbian into English to the client until it has been checked and proofread by at least one other translator. Where English into Serbian translation is concerned, draft versions are always checked by a native speaker of English proficient in Serbian, which practically eliminates the possibility of the mistranslation which is otherwise rife in our language combination. We believe that this result in the ProZ.com contest vindicates our approach to quality control and is a further demonstration to our clients that our translations can be relied on.
