subject: Several Tips For Increasing Translation Quality Without Spending Much Money [print this page] Many businesses ignore the value of pre-editing materials for translation, but this step can reduce costs by 25% and more while ensuring a higher-quality final product. How? By reducing sentences such as "The objective of this chapter is to explain the use of macros in word processing software." to "Chapter Objective: Explain word processing macros." It's easy to see how this saves money, cutting 11 words down to 6 for a cost reduction of almost 50%, but it's also important to see how this makes the sentence clearer, easier to translate, and easier for the end user to understand. Consider hiring a translator or specialized translation editor to eliminate redundancies, standardize style, or even vet entire sections that aren't relevant to the target reader.
Many translators comment that industry-specific jargon is one of the biggest barriers to producing a quality translation. What's more,we use our own jargon so much that we don't even recognize it as such. To a translator, "I'll deliver the target" connotes the transfer of a translated file, while to a hunting goods supplier, it means something very different. A Google search for "industry jargon" reveals 307,000 sites, many of them dedicated to jargon-busting, and full of examples of how jargon leads us astray. To ensure a quality end product, ask an industry "outsider" to review your documents for problematic jargon.
Many documents include redundant text, which, if not eliminated, results in paying for the same translation twice, or even more. One of my recent projects included translating a workbook, and the workbook's answer key. The client simply noted the word count for each document, not realizing that the entire text of the workbook was repeated in the answer key.
Most businesses have specific terms that always need to be translated in the same way throughout their literature, for example the name of a certain machine, process, department, etc. While these terms often appear on a company's multilingual website, "standardize the terms with what's on our site" is a tall order when the site runs into hundreds or thousands of pages with terminology scattered throughout. Creating a multilingual glossary of crucial terms avoids this problem; simply e-mail it to all of the translators on the project. This saves the time needed to respond to translator e-mails when terminology is unclear, and results in a standardized final product.
Good translation depends on context, since words mean different things in different situations. This is especially important in documents such as a spreadsheet of terms, where no context is available. One of my regular clients is a software company doing market research abroad, with the results coming to the translation team in spreadsheet form. The client always provides the text of the survey questions so that translators know what the context of the responses is.
Read-only formats such as PDFs are a great way to exchange documents between users of different systems and platforms, but they slow down the translation process and make it hard to standardize the end product. Many end clients want their documents returned with the same layout, look and feel of the originals, thus saving desktop publishing time later on. When documents are read-only, this is impossible, and results in the translator having to describe where the text should go, i.e. "this is the caption below the picture of the jaguar." Embedded and scanned objects that include text fall into this category too; consider typing the text below the object so that it's ready for the translator to work on.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
