5 tips to improve your company's translation service
If the quality of the translations done for your company is important to you, this blog post will offer some basic tips to help you achieve this goal. Whether your company's translations are done through an in-house translation department or outsourced to a translation company or freelance translator, there are measures that can be taken to help these professionals translate under the best conditions.
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1. Don't cut corners: work with professional translation services
If you have a friend or family member who has a good command of Spanish, French, German or any other foreign language, you may think that it is the perfect opportunity for them to earn some extra income while also helping your company save on costs. It is also possible that this situation occurs within your own company, where there is already a native speaker of a foreign language who can do the translations. If what you need to translate is not very technical, is for internal use or does not affect your company's image, these strategies could be a solution to save costs.
Translation is truly a complex activity and requires specialised professionals to achieve acceptable quality. Anyone who has tried to read a legal contract or a medical report in English, even with a university education, has often encountered difficulties in fully understanding the text. Now imagine that it wasn't your native language and you had to translate it. In short, a high-quality translation is not done by just anyone who knows languages: you need to have an excellent command of the language, know the subject at hand and know how to research.
If translation quality is important to you, it is essential to ensure that your company's internal resources have training and/or experience in translation. If you do not have internal resources, do not hesitate to hire professionals, whether they are translation agencies or freelance translators. You can read this blog “I need a translation: should I hire a translation company or a freelance translator” where you can analyse which option might interest you more depending on your circumstances. If you opt for a freelance translator and want to separate the wheat from the chaff, you might be interested in reading: “How to distinguish a translator from a non-professional?”.
2. Provide context and reference material if available
It is not uncommon for a client to send us a sentence to translate, just like that. However, words can have very different meanings depending on the context in which they are found. For that reason,it is a healthy habit to explain where a sentence or document that we are going to translate will be used. Sometimes the context is obvious and doesn’t need explanation, but other times we see it as obvious because it is our profession, and it may not be as clear for the translator.
A typical case where translators work “half-blind” is in the translation of databases or Excel files containing content extracted from a product catalogue or the interface of a software program. In these cases, the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” applies. The possibility of having the image of the product or the software screen we are translating avoids many potential errors due to lack of context.
It is also important that, if there is already translated material with key company terminology that must be used consistently, you provide these documents to the translator. Not only will you facilitate the terminological search work for the translator, but you will also ensure that they use your company's preferred terminology.
3. Obtain the original materials in an editable format
We frequently receive requests to translate a PDF. The problem with PDF documents is that they are not designed to be modified. As its name indicates, it is a “portable document format.” In other words, it is designed so that we can view any document regardless of the program with which it was created. If there is a PDF, there is a document in its original format. So it is advisable to provide it your translation department, a translation agency or freelance translators. Not doing so means more work for the translators and, in the event that you need a fully formatted document like the original, more work or costs for you.
This problem is even greater if the PDF has non-editable text, as is the case with scanned documents or those converted to vector graphics. Modern professional translation involves the use of computer-assisted translation tools or CAT tools that facilitate the work of translators by providing the text in a two-column format. In this way, the translator has the source text in one column and writes the translation in another column. These programs create a database with the translations provided by the translator, allowing them to search for any previously-translated term in the database. Moreover, these programs allow the detection of repetitions or similar text, which speeds up the work and allows us, as translation companies, to offer discounts based on this technology.
4. Take advantage of your company's specialists or distributors
No one knows your company's products better than you do. For this reason, if your company collaborates with subsidiaries or distributors abroad, it is important that you involve them in the translation process to ensure the terminology used is appropriate for your company. This involves more time and effort for everyone, but it is a process that will significantly improve translation quality, allowing you to also receive feedback on the quality produced by the translation department, the translation company or freelance translator you have hired.
If your company’s size and infrastructure does not make this possible, take a proactive approach by seeking customer feedback regarding the quality of the translations and encourage them to point out any terms they find inaccurate or unclear. For example, WPML (WordPress MultiLingual), one of the most popular plug-ins for managing multilingual websites, offers a module to request feedback from website users about the quality of the translation.
5. Provide all relevant information about your target market
Your company’s target audience may have certain qualities that can influence the translation of your documents. For example, in Spain, there is an increasing trend to use the informal “tú” instead of formal “usted”, especially when products target those under 30 years old. However, languages like German or French maintain the formal address when Spanish would not. English differs in this as it does not distinguish between formal and informal in the second person singular. Providing this type of information to the translator will lead to using an informal address when translating into Spanish.
Another example also involving Spanish is when we do a translation for Latin America. Although translation companies offer Latin American Spanish, the truth is that this variant only exists in the minds of companies hoping to address the entire Latin American market with a a single translation. It also exists in the services offered by translation companies, with the desire to meet our clients' demands. But no one who speaks Spanish overlooks the great differences in dialect between the Spanish spoken in Argentina, Mexico or Colombia. Igor Zubicaray and I explain this very well in the article published in tcworld: “Spanish for local and global markets.”
If you want to save costs and use a variant of Spanish for all of Latin America, inform your translation service provider which country has the most important market for your company, and to use a translator from that region or country.
By following these five key recommendations, we can avoid translation errors, streamline the translation workflow, as well as have peace of mind knowing that we have saved time and costs.
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Josh Gambin holds a 5-year degree in Biology from the University of Valencia (Spain) and a 4-year degree in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Granada (Spain). He has worked as a freelance translator, in-house translator, desktop publisher and project manager. From 2002, he is a founding member of AbroadLlink and currently works as Marketing and Sales Manager.
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