About Havelo · a translation desk in Niantic, Connecticut
Havelo is a desk, not a floor. It sits on Mohawk Drive and holds to a narrow, old-fashioned trade: carrying instructions for use, carton labels and patient leaflets into Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole, then reading every page a second time with fresh eyes. We work the way a good print shop proofs a plate — slowly where a mistake would cost someone, and plainly everywhere else.
Files arrive on this desk from
What they share: a reader on the far side of the page who may be holding the device for the first time — and a QA file that has to show why every word was chosen.
Mohawk Dr · Niantic, CT
How the desk came to be kept this way
Small on purpose, narrow on purpose, slow at exactly the points that matter.
Files come into Havelo by email, are opened by the linguists who will translate and read them, and go back out carrying their signatures. There is no project-management layer in between to retype your request, and no queue where a carton label waits behind somebody else’s marketing brochure. The person who answers the phone on Mohawk Drive can tell you which glossary your term sits in.
We chose depth over reach. Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole are the languages our linguists read without effort — and the languages of a great many patients opening a device carton in this country. Holding to three means each client glossary is kept, reopened and reused revision after revision, by people who remember why a term was chosen the first time.
The habits we borrow are older than any translation software: the print-shop proof, the margin mark, the signed plate. They suit device labeling, where a single line on a carton may be the only instruction anyone reads before they use the thing.
| Rev | Clause | How it plays out on your file |
|---|---|---|
| A | Three languages, each read natively | Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole are the only languages on the desk because they are the ones our linguists grew up reading. For anything else, we tell you so on the first call rather than pass your labeling along unseen. |
| B | A second reader who hasn’t seen the draft | The reviewer works from your approved English and the finished translation side by side — never from the translator’s notes — so one person’s blind spot can’t be read past twice. |
| C | Disagreements settled on paper | Every point where the two readers differ goes into a reconciliation log with the reasoning beside it. The log ships with your files, so your QA team can audit the choice instead of trusting it. |
| D | Proofed where fonts actually break | Tone marks and accents are checked in the exported PDF, after layout — because a missing glyph shows up on the printed carton, never in the word processor. |
| E | A margin note before an invented word Pinned above the desk |
When a device term has no settled Kreyòl or Vietnamese equivalent, we flag it, offer options, and let your team decide. We will not coin a neat word quietly to fill a line. |
| F | Read first, then priced once | We open the file before quoting, then set one fixed figure between $300 and $1,500. The number on the quote is the number on the invoice. |
The people at the desk
Every project crosses three sets of hands, and each signs for exactly what it touched. On a short leaflet the translator may also set the page — but the translator and the reviewer are never the same person.
The first chair
Works from your approved English and the project glossary, into their native language, in the register your reader needs — clinical for the IFU, kitchen-table plain for the home-use leaflet.
The second chair
Reads the translation against your English line by line: doses, contraindications, units of measure, symbol captions. Marks in red; nothing is corrected silently.
The third chair
Returns the text to your IDML, DOCX or XLIFF, checks how warnings break across lines, confirms 21 CFR 801 labeling conventions, then proofs each diacritic in the exported file.
Proofing notes from the desk
Three languages, three different ways for a label to go wrong after the translation is already right. These are the marks we check by eye, one character at a time.
VI · Vietnamese
Two marks on one letter — the circumflex above and the dot below. A font without the combined character drops one, and the word becomes a different word. We proof tone marks letter by letter on every warning.
Liều dùng“Dosage” — two tone marks, either one easy to lose.
ES · Spanish
Questions open with ¿, the reader is addressed as usted unless your protocol says otherwise, and the decimal convention for doses is fixed once in the glossary, then held on every page of every revision.
¿Siente dolor o mareo?“Do you feel pain or dizziness?” — a patient prompt, opened properly.
HT · Haitian Creole
Kreyòl is spelled the way it sounds; the grave accent on ò and è marks an open vowel, not a French flourish. Patients often read it aloud to family, so every sentence has to hold up spoken.
Li enstriksyon yo anvan ou sèvi ak aparèy la.“Read the instructions before you use the device.”
Struck from the house record
A craft is defined as much by what its makers decline as by what they deliver. These are the shortcuts we’ve crossed out, and what goes in their place.
Crossed out in red inkevery sentence is written by one linguist and read by another. Tools keep our terminology consistent; they don’t sign anything.
if your file needs a language beyond these three, we say so at the start, before you’ve spent a dollar with us.
the delivery date arrives with the quote and always leaves room for review. If a date can only be met by skipping it, we’ll decline the date.
an unsettled term gets a margin note and two or three honest options, for your regulatory team to choose between.
if your engineers issue a new revision mid-project, the changed pages are quoted separately, in writing, before anyone touches them.
Return slip · detach and send
Tell us the document, the target language and the page count. You’ll get a fixed price between $300 and $1,500, and a delivery date that keeps the second read intact.
Weekdays 10am–6pm · patients@havelogroup.com
