Translating is more an art than a craft. Some people ask why translating a complex document should take so much time and cost so much. “If you know both languages, isn’t it a simple matter to translate from one to the other?” they ask. The answer is that you can translate from one language to another fairly quickly, but the result is a stilted, often unreadable document that grates on the sensibilities of the native speaker of the target language. The job of the skilled translator is not only to give an accurate rendering of the source language in the target language, but also to make the result polished and grammatically correct. A well-translated document should not read like a translation. This is always a difficult task, particularly when dealing with technical and legal matters.

While the translator works from the written word and can consult dictionaries and various other reference materials to get the precise word in the target language, an interpreter must translate in both directions on the spot, particularly when doing consecutive interpreting. The interpreter is the go-between of two people who do not understand each other’s languages. Making sure the speakers’ ideas are correctly conveyed to the listeners is more important than polished prose.

WET Ink specializes in one language: Portuguese, the language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé, Cabo Verde, and other former Portuguese colonies around the world. With between 210 million and 230 million native speakers, Portuguese is the world’s sixth most widely spoken language. WET Ink founder Edgar Miller is bilingual in English and Portuguese with translating and interpreting experience dating back to 1961. He has translated two Brazilian novels (My Sweet-Orange Tree and A Hidden Life) into English for the prestigious New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Both translations won high critical acclaim in the American press. He lived in Brazil for many years. He has translated extensively in a number of fields including government and public affairs, politics, courts and legal system, environmental studies, and the petroleum industry. He also has done a number of professional interpreting assignments for major American and Brazilian companies.

Miller has visited Portugal and has studied at the academic level the distinctions between Brazilian and continental Portuguese. He also has given journalism workshops in both Angola and Mozambique. Brazil, which occupies more than half of South America and is home to more than half of the continent's people, is more and more attractive to American businesses for whom accurate and fast translations of important documents can spell the difference between success and failure.

Miller also has done extensive translating from Spanish into English, mainly for the semi-annual conferences of the Inter-American Press Association during the 1970s-90s. He will be happy to look at your Spanish document and give you an estimate or recommend another professional translator for the job.

Miller, a member of the American Translators Association as well as other professional organizations, will be happy to help you find a translator for any other language.