MUSEUM AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION
Texts for museums, exhibitions, cultural centres and festivals.
Labels, brochures, catalogues, audio-guide scripts — everything that walks alongside the visitor and explains what they’re looking at.
We work with the Estonian Open Air Museum and translate for art exhibitions, museum curators and others. We know that a visitor spends 8 seconds reading an exhibit label — which is why it has to be clear and tight.
If you’re a curator, museum communications manager or festival director, you know better than anyone: cultural text is among the hardest to translate.
Translate too literally and the visitor switches off. Translate too loosely and accuracy of facts, names and dates slips away. Each period and each subject brings its own vocabulary, too. Translating a 19th-century Estonian author is one task; translating the description of a contemporary digital-art exhibition is something else entirely.
You come to us because we treat cultural text not as an information dump, but as a «personality».
Six formats of cultural communication we work with regularly — each with its own rhythm and its own measure of formality.
We’ve been working with the Estonian Open Air Museum since 2009, for example, and we know its specifics intimately — from ethnographic vocabulary to the museum’s contemporary communication formats. That’s experience you can’t get from a single project.
Cultural text is easy to ruin with rhetorical excess. We try to avoid phrases like «unique atmosphere», «an unforgettable experience», «immerse yourself in history» — but we always follow the client’s preferences.
In our translation, a 19th-century text or a contemporary curator’s voice keeps its character. We don’t replace the author — we help them speak in another language.
Base rate
€16
per page (1,800 characters with spaces) + VAT.
The same for Russian and English.
On a limited budget — a flexible approach based on annual volume. If you have an exhibition plan for the year and a steady flow of material, we’ll work out a tailored format of cooperation.
«The Estonian Open Air Museum was preparing the Russian version of a visitor brochure. 18th– and 19th-century ethnographic terms, names of manors and farmsteads, outbuildings with no direct equivalents in modern Russian.
We assembled a 160-term glossary, agreed it with the museum’s curator, and translated the brochure.
The glossary has since served as the foundation for all the museum’s subsequent Russian-language materials, and each new project goes faster thanks to the base we’ve built up.»
Cultural translation only benefits from a conversation at the start. With a sense of the exhibition’s context, the curator’s voice and the material’s purpose, we work more precisely. Send us a short description of your exhibition and we’ll tell you how we can help.
Kether Translations OÜ
Reg. code: 11442445 | VAT code: EE101183978 | Current account: Swedbank EE782200221038580009
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Designed by Anton & Lotte. Very special thanks to Clauda.
