One Simple Step to Significantly Improve Your Translations

Choosing the right translator for your company is critical, but there is yet another side that needs your engagement. Further quality depends on how effectively you collaborate with your translator. How to avoid critical errors at the further steps? Be sure to provide reference materials. Read this whitepaper to learn why and how.

Introduction

Reference materials is a generic name for any documents, software, etc., which help your translator understand the project subject matter. They provide important context for better understanding and clarify ambiguous wording.

Situation

Translators need reference materials for most of the projects they handle on daily basis. Naturally, some text types such as agreements do not need much context, as they already include all relevant information. With most other documents, though, the importance of reference materials can range from useful to critical. This fact is widely supported by most translators, and yet is unknown to quite a few customers. The misunderstanding surrounding this issue may result in lower quality and deteriorate relationship. Instead of using their time to work on things such as target terminology or style, etc, the translator has to decipher difficult terms or ambiguous wordings. The customers in turn are often not inclined to provide reference materials or clarifications, and can sometimes even doubt the translator's competence, based on the questions and clarification requests they receive. Both parties are better off avoiding this situation rather than combating the consequences.

Why?

Difficult Subject Matter

Most texts are written by specialists who have a good understanding of the subject matter or even hands-on experience. No translator can have the same depth of knowledge.

Below is an example:
Bei der Nacharbeit der Lauffläche des Radialwellendichtrings am Schwungrad den Auslauf verrunden.

This German sentence taken from a vehicle service manual mentions a certain part of a radial seal that is called "Auslauf", literally "output". Without knowing what kind of part this is, we would have hard time translating the word correctly. While a literal translation, "radial seal output", is not exactly incorrect, it is definitely inaccurate from the technical point of view. Even our automotive translator with a 20+ year experience with car repairs could not suggest a proper translation, since he never saw such seal design. We then asked the customer for clarification and received a picture together with description of this seal. In fact, this word simply meant a protuberance on the seal that developed due to friction, a "burr". The correct translation was "Use the lathe to remove any burrs on the friction surface". With no clarification available, there was little chance to match "output" to "burr", i.e. our translation accuracy depended directly on having the reference materials.

Ambiguous Wording

Hundreds of words have more than one meaning. An English word "set" has 58 meanings as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participle used as an adjective. Also, some writers may use indistinct or metaphoric wording. Whichever the scenario, the translator has to choose the correct meaning, before actually do the translation. Below are the examples:

While translating a GUI for an English healthcare software, we stumbled upon a word "MAP". In addition to having several meanings, including geographical map or process map, it was spelled using upper case letters, suggesting that this was an abbreviation. It simply did not feel righteous to do a guess-based translation, since any of the possible versions had a similar chance to be incorrect. We then asked the customer for clarification and received a response that the word meant Mean Arterial Pressure. Obviously, guessing the meaning would have likely yielded an improper result.

Ambiguous Wording due to Context

Depending on the context, thousands of words may have a different meaning, e.g. serve as different parts of speech.

While translating a GUI for HR management software, we stumbled upon a word "match". Based on the context, we gathered that the developers used it in two meanings:

Look through the job matches found for the criteria you entered — the job that matches some criteria, i.e. a noun.

Click on the job you want to match — to match a job, i.e. a verb.

Luckily, in the above examples the context makes the meaning clear. But how do you approach any stand-alone combinations such as "Match columns"? Is it "Columns with matches" or "To match columns"? Should you translate "match" as a noun or verb? Without the reference materials or customer's clarification, you can only guess with a 50% hit rate.

How?

You can get a good start by setting yourself to think "I want to help my translator, since, being a non-technical person, they can have hard time understanding the depth of subject matter, and any help on mu side will only add to quality. This will eliminate any potential conflicts. Remember that it is the collaboration between the parties that yields top notch translations. You can also use the tips below:

• Attach to the translation job as much related information available to you as possible: This could be:
  • existing translations
  • documentation
  • images or drawings
  • FAQs
  • company brochures
  • company catalogues
• The reference materials are especially important for software localisation. Typically, you will be sending all translatable text exported to a separate document, i.e. devoid of any context. Your translator will thus have hard time distinguishing between dialogue names and commands, checkbox names and descriptions, etc. For instance, "Display Help" may both mean a command "To show help" or heading "User Interface Explanations". You can follow the practices below:
  • Provide the software to your translator. This is the easiest and most wonderful way to help, as most programmes today have trial versions. In the course of translation, the translator will be use the program for reference.
  • Make screenshots for all programme windows and save them to a file such as DOC or PDF. This won't take much time, probably 15 to 20 minutes per 1,000 words. Otherwise, you will waste much more time on clarifications or even rework.
  • Be sure to provide user guide and help. If the GUI was localised and you are now launching the user guide translation, make sure that you provide the localised GUI. Sadly, it is just too late, when you open the user guide translation and see that it is not consistent with the existing GUI translations.

Example

Many major translation buyers, especially global companies that purchase translation on a regular basis, understand why reference materials are important. For instance, we have recently translated a part of the intranet for a large transnational manufacturer who did a great job preparing reference materials. All separate phrases for translation resided in the left table column of a DOC document, one phrase per cell. The right side of the table contained screenshots for each respective phrase as seen on the intranet. The convenience of using this context directly added to quality.

Summary

• You can easily add value to your translations by working with your translator, especially by providing reference materials and clarifications.
• Any reference materials can be of help.
• The quality is likely to increase proportionally to the number of reference materials you provide.
• It is especially important to provide reference materials for software localisation, including the programme or screenshots, user guide, or online help.

Translation at Velior

The knowledge in this whitepaper is based on Velior's multi-year translation experience. In our day-to-day activities, we often see how the quality comes to depend on the reference materials. That is why Velior is committed to working with the customers to educate them on importance of the reference materials. One of our long-standing advantages, the consistent quality, is largely made possible due to this close collaboration and placing increased emphasis on using the reference materials effectively.

© 2008 Velior. This document is for informational purposes only. Velior makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document. Velior is a trademark of Velior Company. Names of other companies and products are trademarks of their respective owners. This content can be reproduced only upon Velior's express written permission. If reproduced by any means, the copy shall include a link to Velior and Velior's website. The example in this whitepaper uses the QIP software.