Several tips for reducing translation cost while increasing translation quality
by
Carmen
Many businesses ignore the value of pre-editing materials for translation, but this step can reduce costs by 25% and more while ensuring a higher-quality final product. How? By reducing sentences such as \\”The objective of this chapter is to explain the use of macros in word processing software.\\” to \\”Chapter Objective: Explain word processing macros.\\” It\\’s easy to see how this saves money, cutting 11 words down to 6 for a cost reduction of almost 50%, but it\\’s also important to see how this makes the sentence clearer, easier to translate, and easier for the end user to understand. Many translators comment that industry-specific jargon is one of the biggest barriers to producing a quality translation. What\\’s more, we use our own jargon so much that we don\\’t even recognize it as such. To a translator, \\”I\\’ll deliver the target\\” connotes the transfer of a translated file, while to a hunting goods supplier, it means something very different. A Google search for \\”industry jargon\\” reveals 307,000 sites, many of them dedicated to jargon-busting, and full of examples of how jargon leads us astray.
Americans in particular have a fondness for using terms and examples from sports, often our \\”homegrown\\” sports like football and baseball. However to most of the rest of the world, superlatives like home run, pinch hit, touchdown, Hail Mary pass, or bottom of the ninth fall flat. In addition, making use of sports-centric examples alienates the target audience and slows translators down, resulting in delays and cost overruns.
Many documents include redundant text, which, if not eliminated, results in paying for the same
translation
twice, or even more. While every text contains some amount of necessary repetition, try to eliminate the unnecessary kind. In cases where budgets are tight, consider referencing duplicate text.
Most businesses have specific terms that always need to be translated in the same way throughout their literature, for example the name of a certain machine, process, department, etc. While these terms often appear on a company\\’s multilingual website, \\”standardize the terms with what\\’s on our site\\” is a tall order when the site runs into hundreds or thousands of pages with terminology scattered throughout. Creating a multilingual glossary of crucial terms avoids this problem; simply e-mail it to all of the translators on the project.
Good translation depends on context, since words mean different things in different situations. This is especially important in documents such as a spreadsheet of terms, where no context is available. Providing context allows translators to be more precise in their terminology.
Whether used as a unit of measurement to give the dimensions of a product, or as a figure of speech such as \\”an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,\\” realize that America is the odd one out when it comes to metrics. Pre-convert all measurements into metric before sending the document to be translated.
Read-only formats such as PDFs are a great way to exchange documents between users of different systems and platforms, but they slow down the translation process and make it hard to standardize the end product. Many end clients want their documents returned with the same layout, look and feel of the originals, thus saving desktop publishing time later on. When documents are read-only, this is impossible, and results in the translator having to describe where the text should go. Embedded and scanned objects that include text fall into this category too; consider typing the text below the object so that it\\’s ready for the translator to work on.
Translation consumers can save time and money by paying attention to the human element of the process along with the technical and linguistic sides. Benefit from your translation team\\’s expertise by asking \\”What can we do to make this project a success?\\” rather than just sending off the files and waiting for the result. Every agency and every
translator
can draw upon a multitude of \\”do\\” and \\”don\\’t\\” examples from past clients, so take advantage of this advice and use it to your benefit. Encourage translators to ask questions, and discuss how they should be managed in order to get answers back quickly and accurately.
Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world-wide.
Aunes Oversettelser AS
has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world wide.
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