OUR STORY
WE ARE NOT AN AGENCY! Zavod Prevajalnica consists entirely of translators, subtitlers and proofreaders. When you decide to engage an agency for your translations, you are usually in contact with a marketer, who then passes your texts on to translators like us, sometimes even precisely us. This ends up costing you more.
TRANSLATION TODAY: Zavod Prevajalnica provides top-quality translations at an affordable price – Best Buy. Today, 90% of translators and proofreaders are self-employed, working for various translation agencies and private clients, at different rates and conditions. Not all of them, however, are professional translators; for many, this type of work is a supplementary activity. Even the largest companies rarely employ in-house translators, and the number of proofreaders employed in this manner is even more modest. As a result, the quality of translation services has declined drastically, and our occupation has devalued. Zavod Prevajalnica is one of the pioneers in attempting to connect linguists to improve both their status and the quality of our services.
PRICE: The price reflects the recommendations of the Association of Scientific and Technical Translators of Slovenia and adjustments required in relation to today’s market. A great majority of the proceeds goes to the translators and proofreaders, while Zavod Prevajalnica uses approximately 10% from each transaction to cover the cost of developing its activities, website maintenance and marketing. Zavod Prevajalnica does not generate profit!
DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICES: We were the first to develop the service of text adaptation to respond to the new linguistic situation in the market of former Yugoslavia. The service entirely replaces translation in all of the language combinations involving Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Since the standard languages of these four languages are based on the South Slavic Shtokavian dialect, a text will be nearly entirely comprehensible to speakers of the other languages, regardless of the language it is actually written in.
In practice, this means that a text in Croatian will be completely intelligible to Montenegrins, Bosnians and Serbs (transcribing the text from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet is mere transliteration). As this makes the work of translators a bit easier, text adaptation is not charged at the same rate as translation as that would not be fair to our clients.
Our new method of work involving the above language combinations constitutes the service of TEXT ADAPTATION. It is suitable for all types of texts. The translator adapts the source version of the text to reflect all the rules and principles of the target version (i.e. lexical, morphological and stylistic changes). As spelling differences are also highly important, the adapted text is then reviewed by a proofreader who is a native speaker of the target language.
NON-PROFIT ACTIVITY: We educate and mentor young and inquisitive students and other translators, especially in the field of subtitle translation. We employ social networks, on-line forums and other channels to raise awareness about the translation occupation and the current market situation. We provide free grammar and translation advice to anyone who requests our help. Occasionally, we also provide free translations.
