A doctor’s office is a scary place. Ifyou’re at the doctor’s, chances are you don’t want to be. No one ever plans adate by saying, “How about some dinner, a movie, and a visit to theoncologist?” As scary as they are for everyone ingeneral, doctor’s offices and hospitals are doubly scary if you can’tunderstand what people in scrubs are saying about you. As a non-English speakeryou might be fairly certain they’re discussing something critical to yourhealth and welfare, but how would you know if they’re getting it right?Accurate medical interpretation can be literally life-saving in thesesituations.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis made ahistoric visit to the Philippines. Many public addresses were planned, withspeeches prepared in English. At several stops, however, Pope Francis decidedto discard his prepared speeches and speak from the heart in his nativeSpanish. While there are Spanish speakers in thePhilippines, and Spanish is closely related to that nation’s dominant nativelanguage of Tagalog, English is the Philippines' second language. The Pope’sshift to Spanish would have left hundreds of thousands of attentive Filipinoscompletely lost, creating the need for an interpreter. The Pope, it turns out,regularly travels with a priest who serves as his Spanish to Englishinterpreter, ensuring that the Holy Father can speak freely in his nativetongue and be understood nearly worldwide in the 21st Century’s lingua franca.

How much do translation services cost? Thisis the most common question posed by representatives from businesses that Ispeak to on a regular basis. The simplest answer is that the cost oftranslation services varies based on many different factors. There is no commonformula that can be applied to any document to quickly calculate the price of atranslation. Each type of text is different, and each language pair hasdifferent demands.

Translating official documents requiresnothing less than the expertise of a certified document translation service. Inparticular, legal documents absolutely must be translated accurately.Everything from birth certificates to business contracts are consideredofficial documents. The translators that work on them must bear in mind thatthe consequences of any mistakes could be catastrophic, especially whenconsidering the legal and financial repercussions.

I came across an article about a tool thatwill translate a complete document for you, preserving the formatting of thedocument in a way that other online translators don’t. That’s a pretty coolthing, I suppose, if you don’t mind a well-formatted document that’s notwell-translated. What the program in question does isapproximate translated text from one language to another by way of somegenerally applicable rules and a few more complex rules that are rather likewhat one might call intuition. One might call it that, but it’s no such thing.Programs don’t intuit. They apply. So when it’s all said and done, what theonline format-preserving translation system will do is give you a document thatis a far cry from an accurate translation.

People have been translating texts intodifferent languages for hundreds of years, and up until recently, that processhas remained largely the same. It’s historically been a manual, painstakingroutine: If a phrase appeared 10, 100, or 1000 times in a document, it wouldstill have to be translated each time. But recent years have brought one of themost significant advances to this historically slow, repetitive process: theinvention of the translation memory.