ALBERTO MARTÍN GUTIÉRREZ

________________________________________TRANSLATION SERVICES
SERVICIOS DE TRADUCCIÓN
Bridging the invisible boundaries of global life

WHO I AM

I am a freelance translator based in Alicante (Spain) and I provide sworn translations of English, as well as English-&-German-to-Spanish and correction language services.

SPECIALTIES FOR INDIVIDUALS
& COMPANIES

WORK SAMPLES

CAT-TOOLS SERVICES FOR LANGUAGE PROFESSIONALS (TMs & TBs)

WORK SAMPLES

Please don't hesitate to request an obligation-free quote or inquire at the contact addresses shown below. Check rates.

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MY BACKGROUND

In 2005 I graduated with the Degree in Translation and Interpreting of English to Spanish, and German as second foreign language, and with the Sworn Translator Certificate of English (appointed by the Spanish Foreign Office) at the University of Alicante (UA). My education also includes an academic year at Bangor University (Wales) and a quarter at the UPF of Barcelona.Since then, I have been a European volunteer in Stuttgart, taught languages, worked in the international or corporate department of several companies and honed my translation prowess by making incursions into different fields.As it happens with the specialization in audiovisual translation at Jaume I University or in the literary field at Complutense University of Madrid, the mentioned Degree at the UA was focused on legal and commercial translation. Renowned masters, as Alcaraz and Hughes, lectured. This was the perfect background for my later career handling corporate texts and trade processes.The sculpture of the giant writing hand above is called Dibuixant l'espai (Drawing the space) and can be found in this university. It represents the values of free knowledge and, at the same time, the creation of literature, arts, science and business relations, which translation is exactly about by bridging the invisible boundaries of global life, as my motto says. You can't see what the hand is writing, but it is.

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TRANSLATION SERVICES:
SPECIALTIES

• Sworn translations English <> Spanish of legal or financial documents and those which required this type of translation according to law, for administrative or court processes: birth/medical/marriage/bank/criminal-report certificates, powers of attorney, deeds, academic qualifications and reports, court judgements, contracts, international-law documentation, NDAs, corporate memorandums or operating agreements. Normal translations of them for diverse purposes are also available. Sworn translations used to be always in paper, since the signature and the stamp needed to be original for the relevant notary, judge or administrative institution to attest its authenticity, so they were handed in person or sent by certified post. Today, the option of sworn translations with certificate-based digital signature is widely accepted and has the same function, whether as a final e-document per se or as a temporary one to launch at least the process at stake.• Red tape for foreign SMEs, freelancers or individuals in Alicante area: arrangement of appointments in police stations or municipal/tax bodies, in-person interpreting for administrative processes or medical visits, request and obtaining of NIE, NIF, certificate of registration as an EU citizen or municipal register.• Translation to Spanish of general, essayist and popularization-related texts in English & German. As long as the requirements are met, if a translation engine and MTPE are involved (see next point), a 50%-to-60% discount may be applicable to the final cost, according to a previous quote. It is up to the customer to opt for this path at an affordable price, if the project allows it.• Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE); orthotypography and style correction and revision of texts in Spanish. MTPE services are available for companies or agencies having their own translation engines which produce a text in the target language (see rates). Machine translation together with post-editing is an option applicable to those texts which comply with 1) format (readable and non-picture-embedded), 2) content (long texts with normal syntax), 3) type (excluding poetic, advertising, transcreation-oriented or emotionally-compelling ones) and 4) confidentiality (professional engines work with NDA policies) features, needed for MTPE to be optimal. Both DeepL and Google Cloud Translation engines fulfil their role for this purpose.• Subtitling: translation to Spanish of audiovisual material in English (setting up 42 characters per line plus 20 characters per second by default, as most of the style guides recommend, and with the possibility of spotting and burning of subtitles into the video); transcription of audios and videos in Spanish (talks, lectures, courses, promotional material), with the option of spotting and burning subtitles into the video.• Transcreation, copywriting and assessment in terms of business cross-cultural bridging. To shed some light about what is meant with intercultural differences, you can read my article on the book The culture map by Erin Meyer.• CAT-tools services for language professionals (creation of translations memories and termbases). The computer-assisted translation (CAT) is the use of software to speed up this activity or the processes arising from it. This includes standard tools based on translation memories and termbases (for example, SDL Trados Studio or memoQ), but also cloud ones, such as Phrase or MateCat, and, in a wide sense, those intended for subtitling purposes, e.g., Subtitle Edit, EZTitles or Netflix's proprietary Originator. If you need to increase your databases feeding these tools in any field and in several formats, according to your profile, by means of my services you will save time and improve your translating productivity, while you will get advice on their deployment.

Please don't hesitate to request an obligation-free quote or inquire at the contact addresses shown below. Rates are downloadable here.

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WHAT IS A SWORN TRANSLATOR?

Somebody (normally a freelancer) who is authorized to give legal validity to the translation of the content of a document written in another language or who serves as a (simultaneous, consecutive, liaison or whisper) interpreter in an official act, like a trial. It doesn't have to be necessarily a legal document: it can be even a handwritten note that somebody wants to be officially translated for any purpose. The validity is given by means of a final certification and a registered stamp.Contracts, medical/birth/marriage certificates, qualifications and reports of any kind are all documents that usually need a sworn translation before the Spanish administration, depending on the process (registration of a newborn at the Civil Registry, recognition of qualifications at the Education Ministry, filing of evidence before a Criminal Court, legalization and apostille of The Hague Convention by a notary, work permit or green card at the police station...).As to the format, it is important to remark that in the past sworn translations had to be in paper, since the signature and the stamp needed to be original for the relevant notary, judge or administrative institution to attest its authenticity, depending on the procedure, so they were handed in person or sent by certified post. Nowadays, it is done like this most of the time, but the existing option of sworn translations with a digital signature (certificate-based by prime companies as Adobe, Inc.) is widely accepted and has the same function. In some cases, the digital version is adopted as a final e-document; in some others, it is the way to immediately start the process at stake pending the paper one to arrive.In this regard, the Language Interpretation Office (OIL), the body belonging to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (MAEC) which regulates the work by Sworn Translators and Interpreters in Spain, issued a communiqué on the 6th April, 2020 (note 1) confirming that, as long as the sworn translation complies with the requirements needed for its validity in Spain (contained in the below-mentioned Royal Decree and in the Order AEC/2125/2014), it can be electronically signed and provided in digital format.How to become a sworn translator in Spain? The MAEC (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation) has an updated list of sworn translators-interpreters, also available as a database, indicating their number (mine is 5239), and it is the body recognizing them. You can always check it to look for official translations of certain languages or to make sure that the person offering you an unusually inexpensive rate is really in it. If there is any irregularity, the translation at stake will be deemed as invalid.In its site and in the Royal Decree 724/2020, of the 4th August, the MAEC indicates that the Spanish authorities consider official translations into Spanish those:
1) Certified by the OIL.
2) Done by a translator in possession of the certification of sworn translator-interpreter granted by the Spanish MAEC.
3) Done or assumed as their own by a diplomatic representation or consular office of Spain abroad, provided that they refer to a foreign public document that is incorporated into a case or procedure initiated or filed before that administrative unit and that must be resolved by the Spanish Civil Service.
4) Done by a foreign diplomatic mission or career consular office in Spain, provided that the translation refers to a law or public document of that foreign country.In some countries translators and interpreters have a professional association ("colegio profesional" or similar), like the French SFT, which looks after their rights and fights against professional intrusiveness. This doesn't exist in Spain as such yet.Now that you know all this, the question that I would like to raise is: why would you pay more to have your lavatory repaired than for a sworn translation, given the fact that you want, of course, both things to be sorted out urgently?Please don't hesitate to request an obligation-free quote or inquire at the contact addresses shown below. Rates are downloadable here.

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CREATION OF CAT-TOOLS TMs AND TBs FOR LANGUAGE PROFESSIONALS

Are you a language professional who regularly resorts to computer-assisted-translation (CAT) tools? Have you ever thought that you don't make the most of them because of lack of time or skill? If so, read on.Dear colleague, don't worry: you just found the solution that will avoid you having to spend hours on translation-memory (TM) and termbase (TB) creation, while you will be able to apply it to a specific field in your everyday translation tasks and speeding them up. This way you will skip the pre-processing phase, of which the translation agencies not always take care.In addition to feeding them from scratch, a TM is created through the alignment of bilingual segments extracted from parallel texts; and a TB through the organized columns of bilingual (or multilingual) glossaries which will constitute the fields in this database. The current scene points out to a particular way of working which includes all these available tools together with the exploitable potential behind the AI and which some associations call "augmented translation".My service consists of the following: I build for you a high-quality and language-quality-assurance-revised (LQA) TM or TB for the combination ES <> EN, related to the desired specialty field, in the desired format and for the price of €0.10 per relevant translation unit (TU), which is the memory source-target segment, or €0.05 per pair of relevant terms, respectively. You will save time and improve your translating productivity, while you will get advice on their deployment.Metadata can be included in the TM and its reverse-direction equivalent can be replicated with no extra cost, as well as required fields in the TB can be added; e.g., the "forbidden terms" one, so that your CAT tool can alert you if they are being used in the translation. Another key detail: if it is not a proper noun or alike, the initial letter of every TB entry will not be capitalized, so that it is fully recognized by the CAT tool.Unless needed for a particular purpose, a minimum of 300 TUs or pairs of terms would be advisable for a TM or TB, in each case. Memories over 1,000 segments are quite functional and those over 10,000 allows SDL Trados Studio to create an AutoSuggest Dictionary.Please check the work samples concerning the alignment of two reference documents in the international trade by UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT, together with their respective TMs, or the tennis TB and keep them for your use. These are examples of a legal and sport database, which can be very handy for either a maritime-law text or a journalistic one.A field of expertise having a great interest and an endless number of subcategories is the medicine: a TB of terms linked to the COVID-19 and to the clinical trials would certainly make a difference when translating recent articles of medical journals.These are the usual TM or TB formats with which I can provide you:
• XLIFF
• SDL Alignment
• TMX
• MultiTerm Termbase
• TBX
• CVS
• Excel Workbook
• Bilingual ExcelExcept for the last three ones, which are rather origin backup files, the programs that can recognize one or some of these formats are SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, Phrase (before Memsource) or OmegaT.The specialized tools through which I normally create the TMs and TBs or carry out the LQA are SDLXliff2Tmx, Glossary Converter, Golden Editor, XBench, Heartsome, TMX Editor, OmegaT Aligner, Trados Studio Aligner or MultiTerm.The Quality Assurance makes certain that there is no repetition, unnecessary tag automatically generated, inconsistency between the target and the source, numeric or tag mismatch, failure out of the alignment or double space. Although some false positives are likely to appear, it is the best way to raise the standard to 100% quality and to result in clean databases.Please don't hesitate to request an obligation-free quote or inquire at the contact addresses shown below. More services here.