Charlie Bavington - C Bavington Ltd

French to English Translation Services

Meeting translation needs since 2003

Translation and related services offered

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.

Website translation

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 question asked. Asking you to provide the content, rather than running an extract utility for example, also goes some way to providing reassurance that you are the rights holder of the content.

Executive summary

Self-explanatory to a person in your position - you tell me the level of detail you require, and I'll produce an English summary of the document contents.

Review and editing

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.

Editing GenAI output

Innovative, forward-looking businesses are bound to be experimenting with AI for any number of tasks. It can be assumed that translation is potentially one of them. While the output from ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool might look convincing, it can easily contain errors. AI never responds "I don't know" or even "I'm not sure".

However, apart from not admitting when it doesn't know, 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, either. You may well prompt it to always translate "client" as "customer". AI is frankly capricious about such instructions.

I am happy to look over the output delivered by AI tools, to check that it really is a reliable translation of your source material.

Languages

It is reiterated that while I (the business owner) undertake only French-to-English translation work, 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.

Full Terms and Conditions

Full terms and conditions applying to all these services can be found here.