If your company wants to market its products abroad, it goes without saying that you’ll need your documents translated into other languages. Regardless of whether the translations are being completed in-house or outsourced to external agencies, the basic requirements are the same:
When it comes to translation, many companies fail to see the broader picture, focusing most of their efforts on finding the right agency for them. This choice is usually made based primarily on their requirements in terms of subject-matter expertise and price comparisons.
What many fail to realise is that the costs and timescales for their translation projects can be significantly reduced if the original text (or source text) has been optimised with the translation process in mind. This means:
So how do you do that? In fact, all that’s needed is to follow a few basic principles that all technical writers are used to applying in their ‘usual’ work. These principles are just all the more important when the text is being sent for translation.
In order to better understand the requirements for computer-aided translation, it is first important to know that a TMS is a database that stores segments of previously translated content. The TMS divides the text into segments, looks for similar content in the database (known as ‘matches’) and suggests translations, which the translator then checks and approves, or if necessary adapts for the text in question. A TMS usually uses sentence-based segmentation, meaning each sentence equates to one segment. Within a sentence, certain elements that belong together will be identified as tokens, e.g. the date ‘6 February 2020′ will be treated as a single unit rather than ‘6′, ‘February’ and ‘2020′. Conversely identical texts with different formatting will usually be treated as different segments.
Using this information, it is easy to identify ways to make your text better suited for computer-aided translation and less time-consuming for a translator to work on. Fundamentally, clarity and consistency in your choice of words and phrasing are key.
Graphics and symbols should also be chosen carefully and be as culturally neutral as possible, to avoid them needing to be localised for the target audience.
For graphics containing text, it is also a good idea to ensure the text for translation does not form part of the graphic – e.g. including it as a legend or at least ensuring it can be edited separately from the graphic artwork (using appropriate content management tools).
In addition to content considerations, there are a couple of formatting requirements that must be followed to make the text easier to process with the TMS.
Ultimately, the more comprehensible, consistent and standardised the source text, the more cost-efficient the translation, because you reap maximum benefit from the automated processes and human translators spend less time researching and checking. It is also a good idea to provide the translator with reference material such as terminology, lists of abbreviations, glossaries and – most important of all – a reference copy of the original source document, so that they can see the text for translation in context.
Moderatorin Kerstin Berke und Marketingspezialist Philipp Eng sind das Duo vor und hinter dem Mikro der „Doku-Lounge“…