Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

We are now revamping the process Velior uses to evaluate all work produced by our translators. The ultimate goal is to make the metrics more effective in terms of employees’ development, while lightening evaluator’s task and ensuring more meaningful statistics are available for performance management.

There is a host of existing methods and opinions on this subject. For instance, a recent post by Corinne McKay mentions the classification of errors in certification tests used by the American Translators Association. While it is very detailed, which is probably driven by the need to achieve objective and specific evaluation, it might be too complicated for everyday use in a translation agency environment. My general idea for this environment is to keep the classification as short, and the categories as broad, as possible. This is a three-fold strategy. First, by allowing to map categories to main competencies, this strategy makes it easier for a translator to identify and focus on improving their weaknesses. Second, it provides an editor with a straightforward selection of categories for grading translations, preventing them from overthinking about which category an error belongs to. Finally, it plays a key role in managing employees’ performance, e.g. by providing meaningful statistics as to which jobs cause most problems and what training is necessary.

The refined system I am thinking of now will include five types of errors mapped to respective competencies:

1. Mistranslation: Knowledge of the source language
2. Inaccurate translation: Attention to detail and concentration
3. Style: General command of the target language
4. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation: Knowledge of the most basic language rules
5. Technical: Knowledge of translation technology and best practices, as well as disciplined thought

As mentioned above, one reason for such mapping is to make the translator aware of those competencies that should be on their development plan. The selected competencies are probably among the most important in our profession.

Another aspect of the evaluation process that I am trying to improve now is communication of the changes made by the editor to the translator. This aspect will be discussed in the next part of this post.

What evaluation process and metrics do you use to assess translation quality?

I am a great believer in free and open-source software as it lends itself to empowering people with the technology they need to be more efficient. The ability to use a free alternative instead of a commercial product can be of great value to any person or company, especially a small business like ours, which has to run a very lean operation in order to maintain competitive edge. When a major production tool in an industry is available for free, it is arguably a blessing to many people engaged in this industry. One of such tools in the translation industry is OmegaT.

Sometimes Intuition May Be Misleading

I first got my hands on OmegaT in 2009 and I must confess I wasn’t too impressed. I fell victim of what I now know was a snap judgment—the simplistic GUI and the philosophy that didn’t align with my previous experience with other translation environment tools (TEnTs) required a degree of flexibility I couldn’t come up with at that time.

A year later, I revisited OmegaT to actually rediscover it in a way that now makes me feel bad about the previous snap judgment. In this post, I want to share a few general thoughts based on my recent experience. What I mention here is just a tip of the iceberg, and I hope to be blogging more about this tool in the future as Velior continues using it in our translation projects.

How You Can Benefit from OmegaT

1. Packing all essential TEnT features, including project management, translation memories, and glossaries, into a single tool, OmegaT is a full-fledged translation environment software that provides a viable alternative to similar commercial products.
2. For a freelance translator who is just embarking on a journey to a career in this industry and doesn’t have the knowledge and/or money necessary to buy a commercial TEnT, OmegaT gives a strong helping hand. For instance, it might be a good starting point for those English to Russian translators who are building their translation business from the ground up or seeking cost-efficient ways to improve productivity and quality.
3. For an in-house translator, OmegaT gives the freedom of choice, making it possible to continue working on a project at home or using a laptop on the go just as easy as in the office.
4. Although SDL essentially discontinued development and support of the TTX format, it remains among the most common in the industry. This means that you need the commercial SDL Trados package to accept TTX-based projects and may be a potential roadblock limiting your availability to translation agencies. OmegaT, however, eliminates this barrier by allowing you to handle the TTX format, and many others for that matter.
5. Personally, I also enjoy the feeling of the community-based development process that is open to requests concerning bugs and new features. You can watch the software maturing and may even feel a sense of ownership in case you are somehow involved in the process.

What Limitations Need to Be Considered

Just as many other open-source initiatives, OmegaT carries a certain amount of limitations. Similarly, OpenOffice.org is arguably less sophisticated than Microsoft Office, and Ubuntu is less mature than Windows. Probably inherent to free software, such limitations are often minor in the sense that you can live with them if you make up your mind to do so. What matters most is your mindset—if your chief aim is to save wherever possible or you support free software philosophy in general, you are likely to be okay with the limitations, finding and using a temporary walkaround until they are fixed by the developers.

I am not exactly advocating for using OmegaT, because it is just one of the options available on the market, and it has its limitations. My point is that OmegaT is a valuable alternative to commercial products that can be considered by many translators, and I am happy with the freedom of choice it adds to our industry. Hats off to this project’s team for their enthusiasm!

Which free tools do you consider to be of great value in your work? Is OmegaT among them?

In a recent English to Russian translation project, we worked on a file with all internal repetitions extracted (received like this from our client). As this is a relatively uncommon practice, I decided to use this opportunity and explain my thoughts on this subject.

Example of a Repetition

Let’s take a look at this example to illustrate the main challenge associated with extracting the repetitions:

“Note:“ can occur in at least three different situations, and, as plain as it seems, may cause problems:

1. Below a paragraph. The colon is often replaced by a dot. (Примечание. Обратите…)
2. In the middle of a paragraph. I prefer to keep the colon and begin the actual note with a lower-case letter. (… кнопку. Примечание: обратите…)
3. As a subheading. The colon is often deleted. (Примечание)

In this example, the identical source requires three different translations. Imagine what happens when the identical translation “Note.” is used across all three situations instead. For instance, a standalone sentence “Note.” appearing in the middle of a paragraph may look weird. In a subheading, it wouldn’t be that bad, but might still be inconsistent with punctuation in other subheadings, so why let it happen at all?

Does it mean that extracting the repetitions is evil? No, of course not. In some situations, the benefits derived from such extraction may outweigh any potential problems. Consequently, you need to consider applying this approach on a case-by-case basis and exercise caution, making sure you understand the implications.

Pros

1. A significant, if not the main, gain is the possibility of savings. This is especially true when many thousands of repetitions are considered for extraction. The client’s willingness to reduce the costs through extraction is perfectly reasonable in such situations.
2. Extraction might be vital when two or more translators work on the same project simultaneously. Otherwise, they will likely translate repetitions in two or more different ways. This means double work, hence a plain waste of money. An arguably better solution might be to extract the repetitions into a separate file and have it translated by one linguist and then checked by another and/or the editor.
3. Extraction also helps eliminate or at least reduce inconsistent translations of the repetitions. Although many translation environment tools ensure consistency by automatically changing all occurrences when you edit any single repetition (auto-propagation feature), there is always room for human error in this area.

Cons

1. Extracting the repetitions means that you don’t get a final file from your translator. What you get is an intermediate file, which you then need to process to create the final file, e.g. by creating a translation memory and applying it to a source file. Before you go for extraction, you may want to compare these additional management costs against the expected benefits of extraction.
2. As a translator, I prefer to work on a copy that retains its original look, rather than an intermediate “censored” file. With the repetitions extracted, you cannot see the whole picture, which may decrease your understanding of the source text and the sense of ownership. The pain can be somewhat eased if you have the original copy (with all repetitions) at hand for reference. For this reason, I believe that providing such file is a must in most extraction scenarios. Aside from taking the guesswork out of the translation process, it is also important for understanding more technical things such as tags.
3. I believe that in most extraction scenarios the repetitions must be checked in the final file. In practice, however, this step is sometimes skipped, as it seems unimportant. This approach may backfire in various forms of damage, from minor slips to weird mistranslations. Unless you are prepared for substandard quality, I advise to keep this step in your process, perhaps in a form of a quick proofreading.

By the way, Velior provides discounts for the repetitions in our quotes, making it quite affordable to let us handle the repetitions. And how do you approach the repetitions in your translation business? Do you accept work with any unpaid repetitions?

This post discusses translation challenges that involve words or phrases bearing a language-specific or culture-specific connotation, which cannot be easily rendered in the target text. Because a direct translation is undesirable or inappropriate, they require a more creative approach that considers context or audience. I will use examples (mainly from English to Russian translations) to generate a few ideas on how to approach some of this kind of challenges.

This city is not as huge as New York or even Los Angeles / Этот город не столь большой, как Москва или даже Санкт-Петербург

Here, both the challenge and the solution are simple. With the U.S. cities remaining in the translation, your comparison might not be immediately clear to your Russian-speaking audience. To avoid this, you can use similar Russian cities to get the message across.

SMART Goals / Цели SMART (Specific — конкретные, Measurable — измеримые, Attainable — достижимые, Realistic — реалистичные, Timely — с конкретным сроком)

This is a common word play challenge—acronym “SMART” has a dual meaning. In such cases, you can spend hours of time in search of a Russian equivalent to no avail. A more efficient option might be to keep the English acronym and translate each component in brackets. This way, the reader will be sure to understand the meaning of the acronym and might still enjoy the English word play. To make things easier, you can also provide a note explaining the nature of the word play.

Refer them to someone else who has the time—”No, but I’m sure Susan could help you with that“ / Учитесь направлять его к тому, кто располагает свободным временем: «Нет, но уверен, что в этом вам поможет Сьюзан»

Here, the choice whether to keep the English name, Susan, or replace it by a Russian name largely depends on context or audience.

It is important to consider the general feel of the text. In a text obviously coming from the English culture, a Russian name might feel alien. For this reason, in translations of fiction, the general tradition is to keep the proper names, even though they might be “eligible” for translation. For instance, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, Walter Gay (translation: Уолтер Гэй), is once humorously referred to as Walter Grave (Уолтер Грейв, not Уолтер Мрачный). This approach helps retain the original feel of the text. If you believe a translation will be also helpful, you can provide it as a note.

However, this approach isn’t universal. Where a text requires complete adaptation to the local audience needs, a direct translation might be more appropriate. Doing otherwise may signal that this text is a translation, causing your readers to smile or, even worse, frown, because this time it will be the English name that will feel alien.

In the above example taken from a training course designed for the Russian managers of a global company, I chose to keep the English name to retain the original cultural feel. Because the English language and culture are predominant in this company, the audience is likely to be okay with the English name.

A longer term strategy is to get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a simple guide to grammar / Более полезным в долгосрочной перспективе способом будет изучение книги The Elements of Style [...], которая представляет собой доступное руководство по грамматике. Эта книга предназначена для пишущих на английском языке; аналогичные руководства существуют и для русского языка

This sentence comes from a text about developing your writing skills. Although this text was originally written with English in mind, it also applies to Russian and can be translated successfully. This very sentence, however, refers to a guide that is specific to the English language. It is clearly of little use to the mainstream Russian-speaking audience. Moreover, it represents a risk of confusing the audience. You cannot simply omit the English title though, at least because some of the readers might still find it helpful (again, it is the question of understanding your audience). One method to handle such cases is to keep the English title in your translation, but add a note saying that this is an English-based guide, while similar Russian guides are also available. You can also go an extra mile by including the titles of such guides.

Der Kupplungsservo wandelt den [Pedalweg/pedalweg ] um… / Усилитель привода сцепления преобразует [Ход педали/ход педали]…

Included in a technical questionnaire (translated from German to Russian), this sentence offers a choice of two options in the square brackets. As you can see, the options are the same, save for the case. The difference is purely grammatical—the version with capitalization is the correct one, since the first letter of any German noun is capitalized. But how do you render the German grammatical nuance in Russian, which doesn’t require this type of capitalization? Originally, I couldn’t come up with a better solution than to simply keep the capitalization in translation. It is of course not quite meaningful, because the choice of options may seem ridiculous in Russian. I still think though that the question here is really not how to translate, but why translate at all—why translate into another language a question that is specifically intended to test the knowledge of German grammar?

I will be delighted to know how you approach this type of linguistic challenges in your translations. Please feel free to share what works for you and what doesn’t in similar situations.

P.S. It is also my pleasure to wish a happy New Year to all readers of this blog and our clients.