Services
The Central Translation Office provides a variety of language services. If you don't find what you are looking for below, feel free to contact us at translations@campus.fu-berlin.de. The Center for Continuing Education offers a wide range of language courses including English, French, Italian and Spanish.
Our translation work focuses mainly on the following areas and types of texts:
- Various content for the university website and news channels, including press releases, featured stories, and social media content from the Office of News and Public Affairs
- Content on the university’s central website for the various divisions, subdivisions, and other offices of the university’s central administration
- Administrative documents or online information from one of the central university administration divisions relevant to international students and/or staff
- Job announcements for professorial appointments
- University-wide mailings from the president’s or provost’s office
- Transcripts of records for outgoing students (requested through the individual examinations offices only; see “Transcripts” page)
To request a translation, please visit the “Request a Translation” page and fill out the online form. As a rule of thumb, translation jobs for projects with less than 2000 words have a minimum processing time of approximately three weeks from the time of request. Processing times also vary depending on our current volume of work.
Another important aspect of work deals with terminology related to all aspects of the university from administrative structures and student life to financial terms and quality assurance. Our office is helping to build a consistent, understandable, and relatable vocabulary for university communication in English both internally and externally. Please visit the “Language Resources” page to find out more about terminology tools available to you at Freie Universität and beyond.
Many of Freie Universität’s staff members already have very strong English skills, which is why we are happy to provide our editing services to fellow staff who prefer to provide us with a draft of their writing in English. This is particularly helpful when it comes to texts with a lot of field-specific terminology.
Depending on your project, we might also explore language solutions that use machine generated translations and help you manage the post-editing process.
To request editing services, please visit the “Request a Translation” page and fill out the online request form. As a rule of thumb, editing jobs for projects with less than 2000 words have a minimum processing time of approximately two weeks from the time of request. Processing times also vary depending on our current volume of work.
Even though translations of forms and other administrative documents in Germany are not legally binding, it is certainly helpful to know what a form says when you are trying to fill it out. We have a wide collection of forms that we have compiled over time thanks to translation requests from around the university. If you don’t find the form you are looking for on our “Forms in English” website, please let us know.
We are also happy to provide support in conceptual planning and developmental editing when it comes to projects aimed at a broad international audience that will involve a significant amount of English language content. We also have experience producing subtitles and English versions of scripts for dubbing purposes. If you have other translation and editing needs not mentioned here, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are open to taking on new projects and seeking innovative solutions.
Limited Scope of Services
We do *not* provide services for the following:
- Support for student writing or individual documents
- Projects that will be graded or are otherwise required as part of an academic qualification
- Departmental works related to specific research areas
- Translations of personal documents, for example CVs
- Book-length manuscripts
- Copyrighted material for commercial use for which the university does not hold the copyright
- Web content for individual department websites (content related to the study and examinations offices constitutes an exception)
- Certified translations for official or government purposes
Offices or projects that have budgeted funds for translation and editing services can contact us about potential involvement in late-stage editing and consistency checks for university terminology.