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.

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.

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.”