Expertise

Tradukas GbR is an association of professional translators specializing in the fine arts, architecture, photography, history and the social sciences. We all have a background in the humanities and many years of experience as translators. Most of our work is done in either English or German, although we also have good contacts for other languages, especially French, Italian, Russian, and Polish, which we are happy to pass on.

Experience

Tradukas GbR was founded in 1992 and since then has built up a client base that reflects the partners’ own areas of expertise. We currently provide translation and editing services for German and Swiss publishers specialized in architecture and the fine arts, major museums in Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, and Munich, and various private foundations and academic institutions. (See References)

Quality

Tradukas GbR is a close-knit team of translators who have been working together for many years. We can also draw on a large pool of experienced freelancers, meaning that if time is of the essence, we can quickly set up a team and by spreading the load ensure that the client’s looming deadline is met. At the same time, meticulous line-by-line editing, which is a key requirement of the European translation quality standard EN 15038, ensures that all our translations meet the same high standard of quality and are consistent in terminology, orthography, and style.

A Complete Package

Working with a single provider is a lot easier than having to coordinate several different freelancers. And with only one invoice to pay at the end of the project, it simplifies budgeting, too.

Exhibitions, for example, are complex undertakings and generate a wide variety of texts from correspondence and contracts with lenders to easy-to-read wall texts, audio guides, and scholarly essays for the catalogue. Such stylistic diversity calls for a similarly diverse skills pool. We know where our translators’ strengths lie and allocate the texts accordingly. The advantages of working in tandem on the same project are obvious: the translators have already done the research and so have the material at their fingertips; the same copyeditor edits all the texts, eliminating the risk of discrepancies in terminology, orthography, and style; and the contact person for both publisher and museum is the same.

Other projects entail far more than just translation. A major museum in Vienna recently approached us about an exhibition catalogue for which some of the essays were in German, others already in English. The first task was therefore to have all the texts properly edited by experienced native speakers to smooth out the style. The edited texts were then translated into either German or English, and the translations revised by the editor responsible for each language. The final versions were sent back to the authors for approval and the typeset catalogue proofread to eliminate typos and incorrect word breaks so that the error-free galleys could go to print on time.