Re: Paid Translations?
I work in the translation industry for a large company that does pretty much everything (printed materials, websites, videos, software)
We have large databases of linguists in every country and pretty much everything you can image (and there are some obscure languages out there, let me tell you).
Anyways,
Two things.
A common way to translate text, especially for Flash localization (for example) is to copy and paste all the words/sentences you want translated into a Word file in a SINGLE COLUMN TABLE. Then copy and paste that single column next to it, making two columns of the same "terms" or "strings" as we like to call them.
Then select one of the columns (normally the left one) and hide it with ctrl-h.
Send this to a linguist and tell them to translate all the text they see.
When you get the file back, you can "view indivisibles" (paragraph mark button) which will show you the text you hid, and now you can see what each term becomes in your target language. English on left, target on right.
There's some high-tech stuff we do in the middle, plus QA steps, but it's not really important unless you are a big company wanting to translate 100Ks of words per year.
You could try doing a Google search for the language you want, and linguist and see what you come up with. I also know there are a few professional linguist societies that might have directories to use.
Rates very, ALOT by language. Japanese is one of the more expensive.
Even though we are one of the larger ones, we still take a large number of small jobs. Gotta pay the bills!
Hope that helps. PM me if you have any questions.