Charlie Bavington - C Bavington Ltd

French to English Translation Services

Meeting translation needs since 2003

Translation and related services

What services does C Bavington Limited provide?

The most frequent service is the translation of documents of all kinds, but we also handle website translation, review/editing work and document summary services.

The owner is accredited to provide certified translations of personal documents (birth certificates, the "livret de famille", and similar) as required by official bodies in the UK such as the Home Office. If you need a "traduction assermentée" into French to meet French government requirements, we can handle that for you.

Please note, in all cases, C Bavington Ltd needs to see the documents concerned before proposing a price and delivery date. Confidentiality and discretion are assured as a condition of membership of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.

The owner is also a qualified English teacher, and English teaching is the final element in the range of services on offer.

Document translation

Your French-speaking supplier, customer, subsidiary, parent company or business partner sends you documents in French.

You wish to be able to read these documents in clear, natural-sounding English, within a reasonable timeframe and without spending a fortune.

All our translations are produced by qualified, experienced professionals. Translations into other languages (not just English) are available.

While IT is the original specialist area of the firm's owner, translation needs can be met in a range of other fields (legal, financial, environmental), please see here for a detailed list of subject areas.

Whether or not the translation is for your own use, the more detail you can provide about the intended readership, the better.

Can the company translate our website?

Yes, that is entirely feasible, of course. Please be aware we will need to arrange how your site content will be made available for translation, e.g. in separate individual HTML or XML files, or in one or more Word documents or text files, or some other method. This avoids any misunderstanding about what is and is not to be done. If you send a link to a website for translation, this will be the first request we make. Asking you to provide the content, rather than running an extract utility, for example, also helps to provide reassurance that you are the rights holder of the content.

Can you produce a summary of a long document?

Certainly, we can summarise a foreign-language document into, for example, a paragraph or a couple of pages in English, according to your wishes. Another option is to find content on a specific subject, e.g. you have a long French document on fiscal policy, and you would like to know what it says about company taxes. In essence, yes, it is perfectly possible to extract the information you require from any source.

Can you review our existing documents or translations before we send them out?

Yes, we can check any documents for errors, inconsistencies, unclear wording, awkward phrasing, or anything that might undermine the impression you wish to create. That service includes any translation you have produced yourselves using AI/LLMs. While the output from generative AI tools might look convincing, it can easily contain errors. AI engines never respond with "I don't know", or even "I'm not sure".

What are the issues with GenAI output?

Apart from not admitting when it doesn't know, and its propensity to hallucinate, GenAI translations can also present the following crucial flaws:
Firstly, it does not always follow general instructions (prompts), such as to use British English.
Secondly, it does not always consistently follow specific instructions, such as terminology. You may well prompt it to always translate "client" as "customer". AI is frankly capricious about following such instructions.
Thirdly, and crucially, it will not spot mistakes or inconsistencies in the text. Contradictory contract terms, different prices stated on different pages… but no-one reads your documents more carefully than a human translator.

Poor quality inbound documentation

Well-intentioned suppliers, customers, subsidiaries, parent companies or business partners who are not native speakers of English will sometimes insist on sending self-produced documentation which, by virtue of the errors it contains, may not always be clear.

I (the business owner) worked for a UK subsidiary of a French company for 6 years, and I'm aware of the mistakes and peculiar sentence constructions that French speakers, in particular, are prone to make in English. We will happily review and edit such documents to enable you to understand them fully at the first time of asking.

Which languages does C Bavington Ltd work with?

I (the business owner) undertake the French-to-English translation work handled by the company. However, I am able to make use of the services of other translators (with your permission) for other languages (recent work includes various documents from English into French, German, Spanish and Portuguese; translations into Italian and Lithuanian, for example, have been delivered in the past).

Please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss your particular needs relative to any of the services above.

Are the company’s full T&C available?

The full terms and conditions applying to these services can be found here (does not apply to English lessons).