Preface

Translating? Anyone with a fair knowledge of a foreign language can do that! Hire a translator? I can do that job by myself! The quality of language used for my scientific research results – that’s not important! You may have heard such sentences or similar ones before or even have thought or spoken them yourself… But it is worth hiring a professional translator because: “The translated text should read as if it were an original. That means, from the point of view of language, it should not be recognizable as a translation.”

Wolf Friedrich in: Technik des Übersetzens (Technique of Translating), 1995

• Qualified translators
  In order to meet Wolf Friedrich’s high standards, a qualified and good education
  as a translator, as well as comprehensive knowledge of one’s native language
  and the foreign language, but above all a fundamental understanding of the
  specific subject area are necessary.
  Being a member of BDÜ – the German Federal Association of Interpreters and
  Translators – can be an additional qualification, as only well-trained translators
  can become members.
  
  In contrast to interpreters who translate spoken words into a foreign language, qualified
  translators are specialized in transferring written texts from one language into another.
  Furthermore, most professional translators have one or more fields of specialization.
• Quality
  Both the translator as well as the customer can contribute to the translation’s quality.
  The customer, for example, can provide the translator with relevant parallel or background
  texts or with terminology lists. The translator, on the other hand, contributes to assure
  a high quality by following a certain organizational process and by adhering to special
  translating principles. Having the translated text reviewed by a third party (native speaker)
  is another means being applied at DAHLMANN Translations – Seminars for assuring the
  quality of the text.