iml - Translation

Translation enquiry (Estimate the cost of your translation, and get a detailed pricing from IML)

At The University of Queensland, IML offers a translation service for Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin and Hobart. It is a provider of official, certified translations by NAATI accredited translators in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Arabic. The National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) is the national standards body for translation and interpreting.

Whether your needs are for standard document translations in Japanese, Chinese, Korean or Arabic or successful communication to foreign markets in French, Spanish, Russian or German, IML is the translation agency which can provide comprehensive translation and localization solutions for you. At IML, as a translation service provider we can enable you to increase the linguistic and cultural effectiveness of your website in the world marketplace.

Languages offered

Afrikaans	Cambodian	Filipino	Hungarian	Latin	Persian(Farsi)	Simplified Chinese	Tetum
Albanian	Cantonese	Finnish	Indonesian	Latvian	Polish	Sinhalese	Thai
Amharic	Chinese Mandarin	French	Italian	Lithuanian	Portuguese	Slovak	Tongan
Arabic	Croatian	German	Japanese	Macedonian	Punjabi	Slovene	Traditional Chinese
Azerbaijani	Czech	Greek	Khmer	Malay	Romanian	Spanish	Turkish
Bangla	Danish	Hebrew	Korean	Maltese	Russian	Swahili	Ukrainian
Bosnian	Dari	Hindi	Kurdish	Nepali	Samoan	Swedish	Urdu
Bulgarian	Dutch	Hmong	Lao	Norwegian	Serbian	Tamil	Vietnamese

Please contact us on uqtranslation@uq.edu.au in Brisbane at The University of Queensland if your required language is not listed above. We also provide a translation service for Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin and Hobart.

Translation Rates
*100 English words or part thereof*
- Standard or Everyday Language Translation	$35*
- Academic Transcript, Legal, Medical, Technical, Colloquial or Specialised Terminology Translation	$37.50*
- Highly technical language translation	$40*

Multi-lingual Typesetting for Translations	$100 per hour*
- Affidavit for Translations	$75 + postage
- Driver's Licence, Birth, Death, Marriage, Police Clearance or Degree Certificate Translations	$66 per item

*Minimum Fee for Translations: $66

Standard turn-around time for translations	3-5 working days for a 1 to 4 page document
Express translation service (complete in 2 working days)	25% surcharge
Translation checking fee (if necessary)	Contact us for a quote
Personal Document Translations For non-roman script translations, please provide the preferred English spelling of given names and surnames.
You can use the Translation Enquiry page to get an estimate of the cost of your translation.
All translation rates include GST

Checking
For complex, technical or for publication translations we recommend that a second NAATI translator check the accuracy of the translation.

Quality
We are committed to providing a high quality translation service. We engage translators in accordance with the accreditation standards determined by NAATI (National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters).

The Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT) has approved our formal adoption of the AUSIT Code of Ethics and Code of Practice which has been developed to guide the professional practice of interpreters and translators. The full text of the Code (Copyright, AUSIT 2000) is available from the AUSIT website: http://www.ausit.org/.

Translation related services

Website translations
Script translations
Affidavits for legal purposes
Multi-lingual typesetting

Enquiry
For more information phone (07) 3365 6742 or email uqtranslation@uq.edu.au or visit us personally at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Level 2 Joyce Ackroyd Building, Blair Drive, St Lucia.

Translation direction

We can provide translations in both directions. For example, from German to English, English into German, French to English, English into French, Chinese to English, English into Chinese, Traditional Chinese to English, English into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese to English, English into Simplified Chinese, Spanish to English, English into Spanish, Arabic to English, English into Arabic, Italian to English, English into Italian, Greek to English, English into Greek, Vietnamese to English, English into Vietnamese, Thai to English, English into Thai, Japanese to English, English into Japanese, Korean to English, English into Korean and so on.

Language Information

Spanish Translation

Spanish is the most widely spoken of the Romance Languages, evident both in the number of speakers and the number of countries for which it is the dominant language. Spoken in Spain and all of the South American countries besides Brazil (e.g. Argentina, Chile and Peru), Spanish is also the national language in all of the Central American nations such as Mexico and El Salvador. Additionally, Spanish is becoming an increasingly important language in the United States, with the Latin American population now ahead of African American population as the largest ethnic minority in the country. Spanish is now widely spoken in the US southern states of Texas, California and New Mexico, where it is the co-official language. The ever-increasing international sprawl of a Spanish speaking populace has resulted in the increased importance of Spanish translations and, with the marked participation of South American interests in global mining schemes, this trend is sure to continue.

For translations to be effective with a Spanish-speaking audience, the translation must take cultural differences into account. A NAATI accredited, professional Spanish translator understands these differences and is sensitive to inappropriate references. Depending on the project and the target audience, the translation can utilise different types of Spanish including: neutral Spanish, Latin American Spanish or Casitilian Spanish. This allows the translation to be used seamlessly throughout various countries. A translator can also advise on whether the Spanish needs to be localised for a specific Spanish-speaking market, for example: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, United States, Uruguay or Venezuela.

French Translation

French is another popular Romance Language and, besides accents placed on vowels and the letter c, French uses almost the same alphabet as English, which is attributed to the popularity of French with and accessibility to language learners across the world. As well as being spoken in France, French is an official language in multilingual nations like Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. French is also widely spoken in many French colonial dependencies in Africa (e.g. Morocco and Algeria), The Caribbean (e.g. Haiti and Guadeloupe), The Pacific (e.g. New Caledonia and Tahiti) and South East Asia (e.g. Vietnam and Cambodia). All in all, French is estimated to be the mother tongue of more than 100 million people, with many more familiar with the basics of the French language due to study in high schools and cultural exports.

French is a descendant of the Latin of the Roman Empire. The development of French was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul. French is written with the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet plus five diacritics, for example, the circumflex accent. French grammar shares several notable features with most other Romance languages. French word order is subject-verb-object. French is an offical language of all United Nations agencies and a large number of international organisations.

Italian Translation

Italian is considered by many to be the most beautiful of all languages. Besides being spoken in Italy, it is one of the official languages of Switzerland and is spoken across the globe by an estimated 200 million people. Italian is also considered an important language for all things cultural, with much great Italian literature, prose and theoretical writings translated into English. Of all the Romance languages, Italian is the language closest to Latin. There are many different dialects in Italy which can vary considerably and make spoken communication difficult at times. The Italian alphabet has 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x and y are not used, though those letters are used in Italian translations for words from foreign languages such as English. One written accent is used in Italian, the grave, in a multi-syllable word in which the stress is on the last syllable.

German Translation

German is one of the main international cultural languages, spoken by over 100 million people on a daily basis. Germany, Austria and Switzerland are the main exponents of the language and German also has close ties with Dutch and Flemish. Being a highly technical language, it is recommended that German to English and English to German translations are done by human translators, as machine translations of the language do not yet have a high enough degree of accuracy.

Chinese Translation

There are two forms of written Chinese – Simplified Chinese (used in China, Singapore and Malaysia) and Traditional Chinese (used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and many overseas Chinese communities), but simplified characters are gradually gaining popularity among overseas Chinese as more mainland Chinese emigrate and travel abroad. After end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the new government of the People’s Republic of China made the decision to simplify the Chinese language to increase national literacy rates, reducing the amount of strokes per character and also the number of characters in common use. With China’s steady rise as a commercial powerhouse, the frequent translation of business documents from Chinese to English in the past decades has become commonplace. The choice of Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese is vital in the translation process from English to Chinese, with the geopolitical situation of the target audience of the translation determining which version of the Chinese language is employed.

With China about to overtake Japan as Australia's major export destination, Chinese has become a very important language for Australian exporters. The Chinese population is becoming more affluent and able to afford Australian products such as food, beverages, fashion, sport and recreation - a new phenomenon for Australian producers. In addition, demand for Australian education has grown over four fold in the past five years and has resulted in education joining tourism are the two fastest growing export products from Australia to China. It is not just big business, but also small businesses which are having success exporting to China, riding the wave of a business boom that does not look like fading any time soon.

Japanese Translation

Japanese is a unique language as no definitive link between any other language can be established with Japanese. The Japanese language is distinct from Chinese and Korean, although the written form uses Chinese characters. Japanese uses three different writing systems of varied complexity, two of which are syllabic (hiragana and katekana) and relatively easy to learn with 50 characters each. On the other hand, Japanese characters known as kanji number in the many thousands and sentences are written vertically and begin on the right of the page. The divergence of Japanese from other language structures suggests that, for communication with the almost 130 million people in this business driven nation, Japanese to English and English to Japanese translation and interpreting is vital for our greater understanding in the global community that we live in.

Linguistically, Japan is nearly a homogeneous nation with nearly 99% of the Japanese nation using the same language. This means that the Japanese language is the sixth most spoken language in the world. However, the language is scarcely spoken in any region outside Japan. A major difference from English is that Japanese has no stress accent: equal stress is given to each syllable. Whereas English syllables are sometimes elongated, in Japanese, strings of syllables are spoken with the regularity of a metronome. As for basic structure, the typical Japanese sentence follows a pattern of subject-object-verb.

Russian Translation

Russian is the most important of the Slavic languages. With the powerful emergence of the Soviet Union in the past century bringing the language to the fore, over 250 million people now speak Russian worldwide. Written in the Cyrillic alphabet, the translation of documents from and to Russian has become vital to forge links in the Post-Cold War environment in which Russia has also become a business powerhouse.

Arabic Translation

Arabic is one of the world’s major languages, officially spoken by over 250 million people throughout a large geographical band of nations including Saudi Arabia, Oman and Morocco. Arabic is made up of a distinctive alphabet and a script that reads from right to left. Due to recent political and business changes in the region, there is now a constant flow of Arabic to English translations and vice versa.

Related links for: Translation

Translation enquiry
Calculate the estimated cost for your translation and send your details and document (optional) to IML for a quote.