5 ideas to reduce translation costs of your IFUs and manuals

Obviously, the efficient use of resources is one of the keys to the success and survival of any company.

The translation of manuals and IFUs may represent a major expense for manufacturers of capital goods. However, it’s possible to reduce the costs of manual translations.

Remember that not all strategies below will work for every case. As general rule we can say that the more translation languages, the more effective will be these strategies.

1. Linguistic creation or revision

Translation quotes are based on the number of words to be translated. So, if we have less words to translate, the lower will be the costs for translations.

This means that while creating manuals or IFUs we get the chance to reduce translation costs. We can reduce the number of words by making use of synthetic language as well as information blocks.

There are different systems on the market to develop technical documentation, such as Adobe FrameMaker or MadCap Flare, which facilitate the writing of manuals by organising the information in blocks.

In case you have already written manuals or IFUs without having taken these strategies into account, it may be cost-effective to revise the document to reduce the number of words before translation. The greater the number of languages to be translated, the more effective will be this strategy.

2. A picture is worth a thousand words

Another strategy which may help to reduce the text volume of your technical documentation is by using graphic content. This has become a trend and can already be seen in many manuals, especially those involving assembly instructions.

As I said in the previous section, the viability of this strategy is also linked to the number of languages into which you need to translate your manuals or IUFs.

3. Translating from English

Another strategy to reduce the number of words is to translate from English. English usually expresses the same ideas in fewer words than Spanish or French.

The best option is to write your manuals or IFUs directly in English. In addition, there are other reasons why it may be more convenient to create our documentation in English: “3-reasons-for-and-2-against-translating-from-English”.

4. Analysing the feasibility of post-editing

Post-editing is the revision of the machine translation by professional human translators. Depending on the content type of our manuals, it’s possible that the quality achieved by machine translation is good enough to make this approach feasible.

While post-editing increases the productivity of translators, the regular price per word will be lower than for translation.

In case your manuals or IFUs are highly technical, aimed for unusual products, you will hardly be able to use machine translation systems like Google Translator.

In order to get quality machine translation outcomes which can be post-edited, you will need to create machine translation engines that are customised to your company's content. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend th following article: “Customized machine translation: The right option for my company?”.

One of the strategies for higher machine translation quality which companies such as Microsoft or Symantec use, is to pre-write the content adapted for machine translation system.. This facilitates the machine’s recognition and translation quality. This can basically be achieved by writing short phrases and avoiding creative or metaphorical language.

5. Consistency of formats and phrases

For more than two decades, many translation companies have been offering discounts based on previously translated content.

At AbroadLink Translations, every translation quote, includes a previous analysis, using the translation database we maintain for each client.

This workflow step is the most common among translation service providers today.

If you always keep the same sentence for one message, you will reduce your translation costs as your translation provider will already have the same sentence translated and will offer you a discount.

In addition, keeping the same format also makes the process more efficient. In other words, the same sentence to be translated in InDesign or MS Word may not be identified as identical if, for example, it’s written in bold.

That’s because the usual programmes which create translation databases (known as translation memories within the translation industry). So, it’s always good to check your formatting, otherwise the discount will not be applied.

Nowadays there are many tools for writing and creating multilingual manuals and IFUs which may help you to reuse previously created content and keep the formatting as consistent as possible. This will facilitate the reuse of translations by the translation provider.

These systems can even help you identify previously translated content on an internal level, so that the management of your multilingual content can be directly done in-house. Adobe FrameMaker offers this feature. Other more affordable systems for SMEs to manage you documentation is Single Feeder.