5 Cool Writing Apps to Perfect Your Translations

If you earn a living as a translator, then you’re probably used to writing large quantities of text. Writing. Rewriting. Paraphrasing. Even if your command of the English language is perfect, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to your writing techniques. Whatever language you translate from, whether it’s Spanish to English or Arabic to English translations you provide, check out these 5 cool writing apps you can use to perfect your translations:

1.Writefull

Writefull is an almost inconceivably cool tool that you can download to your laptop for free. Drawing on its database of more than 5 million books, you can glean invaluable feedback on your usage of grammar and the suitability of your words.

Particularly handy if you’re translating a literary piece, magazine article or other similar large chunks of prose. Writefull works by comparing your sentences and text with paragraphs that are similar and already exist online.

Writefull is not the same as Copyscape. So you’re not scouring the web for duplicate content here. The purpose is to ensure that your use of grammar and syntax is optimum. This is an especially useful tool for translators whose native language is not English, as it allows them to turn a good translation into an outstanding one.

Simply select the part of a text that you want to check out, and Writefull will display a number of times it appears online and how, helping you decide if you could have phrased your work better.

You can also find synonyms for words you select if you’re feeling short on inspiration. And if you simply can’t find the right word at all, you’ll get a complete list of possible options. No more writer’s block when it comes to translating texts. 

2. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

While you need to stay as close to the source language as possible when you translate an article for news or magazines, remember that you want your headlines to be as catchy as possible in English as well. It doesn’t matter how great the article content is or how well you’ve translated it, if the headline is bland, it won’t inspire clicks.

So once you’ve translated the title to your liking, try running it through a headline analyzer tool, like CoSchedule. You can make sure that your translated title is grammatically correct and go ahead and fix any errors if you need to. You can also see ways in which it can sound more appealing.

Tweak your translated headline with CoSchedule. Taking into account your use of powerful, emotional, common and uncommon words, it will suggest how to make your headline more balanced so that it sounds better and gets more likes and shares. 

3. Evernote

Evernote has long topped the charts for productivity apps and it’s easy to see why. When you’re managing multiple clients and translation projects, it can be hard to keep organized. So now you can let Evernote take care of the hard work for you and ensure that every client ends up with the right finished project.

Synchronizing across all your devices, the great thing about Evernote is that you can jot things down of inspiration to you. Take notes from a call on your cell phone and open up the information you need on your computer afterward.

So, whether you have a ton of translation to-do lists or comments or ideas that you want to keep in one place, Evernote allows you to free your mind and act as an extension of your translation memory.

4. Pocket

Most translators read a lot. The very nature of a translator’s work requires extensive reading. Whether you want to brush up on your English language skills or understand the context of a play or text, you’ll have to do your research. So if you want to become a better translator, then you should probably spend some more time reading.

But when you stumble upon interesting facts and articles, interrupting your translations continually during the day to sign up for courses, or read up on verbs and adverbs can be distracting. Not to mention time-consuming if you’re trying to stick to a deadline.

Enter Pocket, a convenient app specially designed to help you save all the interesting articles, videos, and notes you find each day. Saving them in one place for you to read later on when you have some time.

Pocket can even save information from your browser, or social media channels like Pinterest, Twitter, or Pulse. And even better than that? You can transfer all the useful information over to Evernote and keep it as a resource for further English translation projects.

5. Hemingway App

The Hemingway App is fast becoming an English language professional’s best friend, helping journalists, authors and translators to make their writing bolder and more fluid. It intelligently detects phrases and complex words that are hard to read and advises you where you’ve used an excess of adverbs or passive voice. The Hemingway App will show you how to phrase things more simply and avoid over-complicating your writing.

Translators can work easily with Hemingway in two different ways, either Write or Edit, and you can also work in HTML if you need to. So you can check your own work, start from scratch or edit an article you’ve already translated into English.

Better than that? The Hemmingway Editor comes in four different variations of English: American, British, Australian and Canadian, so it’s extremely useful if you need to localize your translations to clients in different regions.

You already know the qualities you need to be a great translator, and nobody said that it was easy. But now you can use these handy new apps to help you polish your work and deliver flawless translations faster.

You can work more easily towards deadlines by increasing your productivity and keep your clients happy delivering well researched and perfectly localized texts. One word of warning though – remember that no technology is perfect. Just because they named an app after the famous writer, doesn’t mean you’ll write like him overnight.