Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

Last week, one of our clients contacted us with an update of a manual we had previously translated from English into Russian. The client made changes to the source text and now wanted us to make the same changes in the Russian version by updating the old translations and adding the new ones directly in the manual (Microsoft Word format). While this is not our preferred approach to updates, it’s totally fine with us, because it helps clients to avoid DTP costs (such costs are typical of the industry-standard approach, which is to translate the entire new version using the translation memory from the previous version). We extracted all modified and new sentences and translated them using the old TM. We then proceeded to insert them in the previous version. At this point, much to our surprise, we discovered that our translation had been edited by someone else. For consistency reasons, we now had to examine the “surprise” edits and then adjust our new translations accordingly.

Such “surprise” review also happened to us a few times before, so I decided to put together a blog post about it based on this example. I will focus mainly on the downsides. Please don’t get me wrong, I love clients’ reviews and believe they are mostly beneficial. The “surprise” review is beneficial too, but it may also create unnecessary problems. And in this case, avoiding the problem is definitely easier than struggling with its aftermath.

1. While a person doing the review, whether a client’s employee or their local distributor, is normally qualified to do the job from the subject matter expertise perspective, this person may not be an expert translation-wise and introduce a variety of errors into the translation. For example, as a translation company, spell checking and automatic quality assurance on each translation are in our DNA. In contrast, a client’s editor may not even be aware of these tools, let alone use them routinely.
2. A very common type of error associated with surprise review is inconsistency. This is a serious problem that can result in misleading translations. Imagine an end user scratching their head over a manual that randomly uses three different names for the same procedure. Inconsistency will also confuse folks who will provide future translations to this client, because they will normally want to keep the new translation consistent with the old material. But how can they do it with the old stuff inconsistent in the first place?

This post is continued in part 2.

Sending a translation request through a mass email, i.e. a non-personal email sent to several translators at a time, is a tool of last resort used by translation agencies in case of a very urgent job. Although effective and often reasonable, this is a very controversial practice, since more often than not it can be perceived as an impolite way of doing business. I would like to use this post to explain what we think about this kind of emails and share our experience with them.

The main problem with mass emails comes from the fact that many vendors (a) don’t like to be treated like a “commodity” and (b) don’t want to run the “whoever replies faster gets the project” race. A translator receiving such email will often delete it immediately, and if this kind of requests continue to arrive, they might even become irritated. That is why we never use such emails ourselves. Because we contact freelancers not too often, we enjoy long-term relationships with a limited number of English to Russian translators and won’t risk damaging these relationships. Also, most of our projects are not that urgent to call for aggressive email tactics. Even if we accept an urgent job (rarely), we prefer to process it in-house to have higher control over the translation process and avoid the risk of delay.

When we receive a mass email from an agency client ourselves, we treat it as a business opportunity, rather than an offensive practice. Focusing on the business side helps approach the request constructively and ignore the manner of contact. Yes, we very much enjoy and long for a personal touch, in particular because our line of work heavily relies on computers and provides little face-to-face contact with the customers. But it’s not as important as the level of customer service. As a translation company, our first and foremost goal is to serve our clients in the best possible manner, while also remaining profitable, which means that the clients always come first and any feelings should come second, if at all. In fact, the project manager contacting us with such request might be very busy at the moment, with dozens of other projects to assign on hand. Our job is therefore to simply evaluate this request just as any other project, assess our capability, and reply accordingly. There is even a chance that the law of reciprocity will work for you: after you handle several requests in the above-described positive fashion, you might be soon rewarded by a personal request from this project manager instead of a mass email.

Another issue about such emails is that whoever replies first usually gets the order, leaving all other respondents with empty hands. We also don’t have any problem with this. If the agency accepts our offer, that’s great. If not, what do we lose? Just the time spent on evaluating the request. But this is a normal expenditure required to run a translation business and happens all the time, so no big deal.

And the sweetest part is that through mass emails we received some of the most profitable projects so far. They often pay well because of the rush surcharge and compensation for additional services such as recreation of formatting due to uneditable source text.

And what is your opinion about mass emails? Are you inclined to delete them like many translators do? Or do you simply treat them as a business opportunity?

Despite the rise of content/translation management systems, the share of uneditable source texts in translation supply chains remains significant. One reason is simple unavailability of the original editable versions. An example could be a Soviet Union patent issued back in 1980s that now needs translation from Russian into English. Or a client may want to translate documentation, which was provided by a subcontractor in PDF format several years ago, and now they lost contact with the subcontractor. Because handling such files can be challenging, it is important to consider preparing them for translation before you proceed.

Best Way to Prepare Uneditable Files for Translation

It is our experience that the best approach to uneditable files is to prepare an editable copy through an optical character recognition (OCR) process. This is also a method of choice with many of our peers.

Now, the main dilemma is that clients don’t always agree with the OCR charges. Instead, they would often prefer to have a linguist translate into an empty DOCX file while referring to the original. The willingness to avoid the OCR costs is perfectly reasonable, particularly with small and less significant jobs. But let’s consider some of the reasons why OCR might be a better alternative.

Indirect Benefits of OCR for Clients

1. It is usually easier and faster to translate an editable file than an uneditable one. A translator doesn’t get distracted by low-value formatting tasks, which often consume much time and energy that should be rather spent on high-value translation activities. An editable file eliminates the need to manually re-key numbers, company names, product names, addresses, and so forth. Translating into an empty DOCX file means you need to double-check whether all content was transferred from the source file correctly, while a properly OCRed file makes such check either marginal or completely unnecessary.
2. Editable files make it possible to use a translation environment tool (TEnT). This provides at least two benefits in terms of quality: (a) easier bilingual editing process, especially for an editor, and (b) the ability to use an automatic QA tool.
3. Using a TEnT also provides an efficient backup functionality, with a translation memory storing each translated segment and making disaster recovery easy. We learned this the hard way many years ago after losing a day’s worth of work by accidentally deleting a document which was created by putting translation into an empty file.

These performance improvements have a positive impact on speed and quality of translation, resulting in indirect benefits for clients.

Direct Benefits of OCR for Clients

1. OCR enables advanced analysis of a source file against a translation memory, allowing to detect internal repetitions, which are otherwise unseen. This may result in significant discounts. One project we completed with OCR had as many as 25,000 repetitions (with 10,000 unique words only). Paying full rate for repetitions instead of paying just a fraction of costs for OCR would have been a major waste for our client.
2. One of the common problems associated with uneditable files from the clients’ perspective is the uncertainty about the word count and the estimated time of completion. OCR essentially eliminates this headache, because as soon as an OCRed file is ready, a client can receive an accurate quote. If you are a project manager at a translation agency, you can then use this information to produce a more specific and meaningful quote for your end client. Using OCR can also put you in a particularly great light if your competitors submit vague or too expensive quotes based on guessing, rather than an accurate analysis.
3. It is sometimes necessary to divide an uneditable file between several translators due to time constraints. Letting each translator take care of formatting on their own normally results in an inconsistently formatted final file. Such inconsistent layout may require rework or even go unnoticed and damage your reputation when seen by your clients or prospects.

What are some of your approaches to uneditable files when you buy or provide translation?

This post expands on my older entry about the role of proofreading and the importance of having it done by a qualified person, ideally your original translator. Now, I would like to follow up on, and reinforce, the idea that using someone who is not qualified to do proofreading or dropping it altogether can result in problems ranging from slightly reduced quality to simply unusable content.

Blunders + Proofreading = Happy Ending

With website translations, many clients prefer to copy their website content into a text file, have it translated, and then paste it back. This means a manual, error-prone process. Some time ago, we did an English to Russian translation of a pharmaceutical company’s website, and the person who manually pasted our translations to the site made a major error. One of the pages had a table with the drug names in the left column and their descriptions in the right column. In one of the rows, the specialist erroneously replaced a drug name with its description, leaving the next (description) cell empty. Instead of two cells, the resulting row had just one cell, and, to make things worse, this cell was also invalid. Luckily, the client did request proofreading, which made it possible to find and correct the blunder.

Website that Could Use Some Proofreading

The second example is also a recent website project—German to Russian translation for an equipment manufacturer. Here, no proofreading was ordered at all. Some time after delivery, I checked this website, since I wanted to showcase our work to a prospect from the same industry. What I saw, however, made me completely abandon the idea of showing it to anyone:

Untranslated English section names: “Home” and “Shop.” While these English words might look okay in the original German version, they look plain weird on the Russian pages. Perhaps, the translation was pasted and/or proofread by a native German speaker who assumed that because leaving “Home” and “Shop” untranslated is alright in German, this should be equally acceptable in any other language.

Russian word order replaced by German word order. This was probably triggered by similar thinking (okay in German, should be okay elsewhere). In fact, it was again incorrect, resulting in phrases such as “XYZ-cuttng tool.” First, the manufacturer’s name (XYZ) cannot be placed in front of the product name with a hyphen like this. Second, “XYZ” connects with a hyphen to the adjective instead of the main noun, which is grammatically incorrect.

Em dashes were globally replaced either by question marks (probably, damaged during pasting) or hyphens (perhaps, the person who did the pasting noticed some of those question marks and replaced them by what was in the source text). Now, using a hyphen instead of an em dash is not very good in Russian, but will likely go unnoticed with most readers. However, a question mark in the middle of a sentence is clearly inappropriate.

A few paragraphs were assembled from the sentences that we originally translated as standalone pieces, without any full stops. What resulted was paragraphs consisting of just one very long sentence.

These examples illustrate what might happen when a linguistic decision is made by someone who doesn’t know the target language, and the result of this decision never gets checked. Based on this kind of experiences, I am an avid advocate of proofreading the final content, whether files, software, or websites. As it usually takes little time and just a small fraction of your project budget, it’s really cheaper to do it and be safe than deal with potential consequences. An attempt to save on this step may backfire in much greater loss of business when your prospects are turned away by blunders.

This post offers a few best practices for translating uneditable text. The approach to handling this type of text depends on the source files:

1. Many uneditable texts are scanned copies of poor quality. A good example is medical records written in Russian. Russia-based healthcare professionals often develop illegible handwriting, because they handle too much paperwork daily in the environment that is still largely paper-based. For this reason, their written opinions or prescriptions are often Greek to the people outside of medical profession, including translators. Ideally, we prefer to use a healthcare professional to “decipher” such records, instead of translating directly from the scans. This eliminates hours of guesswork otherwise spent by a translator.
2. Another common uneditable text type is a PDF file printed from a desktop publishing software or MS Word. In such cases, we ask the client to provide the underlying editable file such as INDD with Adobe InDesign, because handling this editable file requires much less effort than translating the uneditable PDF. Typically, the underlying file is available and can be easily provided by the client. A common reason for the client to initially provide a PDF file instead of an INDD file is simply being unaware that the latter can be translated more easily, leading to reduced costs.
3. Where the items 1 and 2 above are not applicable, we resort to the optical character recognition (OCR), recreating the uneditable content in a separate text file. Creating an editable file enables our standard translation workflow, which is built around processing bilingual files. Where any complex formatting is required, we add the cost of OCR to the total amount billed to the client: this service is called “recreation of formatting.” With smaller or simpler files, we may do the OCR free-of-charge or bypass this step by translating directly from the source file.
4. Sometimes, the client would complete an automatic OCR at their end and then request translation of the resulting editable file. With the files that include complex formatting such as tables or figures, the automatic OCR tends to provide poor results, and the OCRed file may still need many manual adjustments. In such cases, we may ask the client to compensate the “recreation of formatting” anyway, despite the theoretically editable source file.

Recently, I have covered the topic of outsourcing typesetting work in translation jobs, mentioning that the original translator should be preferably used at the proofreading step. In this post, I would like to discuss this recommendation in more detail.

Place of Proofreading in Translation Workflow

Due to role distribution in translation process, translation vendors sometimes have little or no control over the typeset translation. In a common multilingual project scenario, a translation agency requests translations from its single-language vendors (SLVs), inserts them into final files, typesets these files, and arranges proofreading. Here is a bird’ eye view of this process:

Source text preparation (DTP specialist) => Translation (SLVs) => Typesetting (DTP specialist) => Proofreading (?)

Why Proofread at All?

Is the proofreading step worthwhile? The answer is yes, absolutely. Without proofreading, the typeset files may contain so much layout issues that even a top-notch translation will not mitigate the pain. The next logical question is who should be responsible for proofreading. I think the choice depends on the workflow design, agency’s flexibility, and, certainly, budget. Potential proofreaders are listed in the order of preference below:

1. Original translator
2. Original editor
3. Any person with linguistic background, ideally a native speaker of the target language
4. DTP specialist

Ideally, this task should be assigned to the original translator. Generally, this translator possesses more knowledge about the translation than anyone else. They will identify issues more easily and efficiently, because they already know the potential pitfalls. Even the original editor is less efficient in this role, because of the reduced involvement in the translation as compared to the translator. Below are a few examples from our experience in support of this approach.

Issues Eliminated through Proofreading

1. Twice in my career, I have seen agencies deliver large (over 100 pages) manuals to the end client without any typesetting and proofreading (the latter could have helped bring the layout issues to the agency’s attention before delivery). Both times, the end clients were furious about the layout, which was basically non-existent. I have been always using these examples to discourage our customers to drop the proofreading step.
2. With many language combinations, English to Russian translation being one of them, the translated text tends to expand in length. Inserted into the final files and typeset, it often does not fit into the available space, which results in cropping or overlapping. Such issues are hard to identify, unless you know exactly which translation is supposed to be in this or that place of the document or proofread the entire document carefully (requires knowledge of the target language).
3. Certain issues such as different word order in translation due to split source sentences cannot be dealt with directly in the translation files. These should be checked and corrected in the typeset final files.
4. A DTP specialist may forget to extract the text from images for translation. Such untranslated text is routinely identified during proofreading.
5. A DTP specialist may also skip numbers, especially in tables, while they often do need localization such as changing a decimal point to decimal comma (e.g. 0.01 to 0,01) or changing thousand separators (e.g. 50,000 to 50 000). Again, proofreading helps eliminate such issues easily.

For more information on proofreading, you can read our article “Proofreading, Editing, Review, Independent Review.”

This post is about situations where a client, typically an agency, outsources the typesetting portion of a translation job to us. The pre-translation conversion, back-conversion, and typesetting for most DTP formats at Velior normally follow the procedure below.

1. You provide your DTP files such as INDD or QXP. It is also important to provide the fonts and images if applicable. To do so, use the respective “Export” feature in your DTP application. Because sometimes the fonts used in the source files cannot be used in the target files, you also need to indicate the font to be used or let us choose an appropriate font.
2. You confirm the language the files will be translated into (e.g. English to Russian translation), so that we can use the correct procedures for this language combination if any and set this combination in the translation environment files.
3. You confirm the translation environment tool you want to use in this job such as Wordfast Pro. Otherwise, we can simply extract the translatable text into a table with the “Source” and “Target” columns.
4. We convert the original files and deliver the translatable files and also PDFs for reference.
5. Your translator completes the translation, creating bilingual files and using the PDFs for reference.
6. You provide these bilingual files to Velior.
7. We back-convert and typeset these files, then send the PDFs for your review.
8. Your reviewer (preferably, the original translator) reviews the PDFs and returns them with annotated corrections. Any explanations should always be in English or Russian. If a translation environment tool was used, you would normally ask your reviewer to also correct the bilingual files, so that you can update the translation memory for future use. However, we do not need them (see also the note 1 below).
9. We implement the corrections and create the final DTP files and also PDFs. If your reviewer made many corrections, they may also request or be requested to review the PDFs again to ensure that all corrections were implemented properly by Velior.
10. We deliver the final files to you and confirm the time spent on this job for the invoice.

Notes:

1. It is normally cheaper for you to send the annotated PDFs after review, but not the updated bilingual files. When you send the updated bilingual files instead, we have to completely redo the entire typesetting, which usually costs you more as compared to implementing the corrections to the already typeset files. For instance, when a reviewer made just a few corrections, it will take about 5 to 10 minutes to insert them in the existing typeset files, while redoing the entire typesetting from scratch takes at least 30 minutes and usually more. Additionally, the reviewer is supposed to check the PDFs for formatting issues, but when they return the updated bilingual files only, they obviously do not report any. And you can only wonder whether theу did not actually find any formatting issues or just did not care to report them. However, sometimes it is indeed easier to redo the entire typesetting from scratch—when a reviewer made so many corrections that implementing them will take more time than redoing the typesetting.Given the above, you would usually instruct your reviewer to insert any changes directly in the PDFs.
2. Since this conversion and typesetting process involves many steps and participants, it is normally difficult to establish any accurate deadlines beforehand. Velior therefore recommends to always reserve as much time as possible for the process.