Forum posts to 'Translation, Edit, Proof'

Re: Translators education, backgrounds and experience

Roman Mironov — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:56:51 -0600

Has anyone had quality concerns when this may not have happened?
I have seen quite a few quality concerns associated with medical translations during my career as a translator/editor.

In my opinion, one reason behind this is the great variety of medical specializations. No translator can know them all. Some translators however assume that by achieving a certain degree of subject matter expertise in one or several specializations, they can easily translate any other field, and when they do so, they fail to do a good job. Other reasons are more general such as a translator being lured by an attractive price, while they do not have the appropriate knowledge or skills to do the translation.

Do you know for sure that the correct resources are being used on your projects
This is indeed an issue in the translation industry where a job can be pushed through so many outsourcing levels in pursuit of the lowest price that the ultimate $0.01 translator would not be qualified even to write a high school essay in the target language, let alone medical translation.

I think one way for a client or agency to be sure about a vendor is to carefully select and get to know your translator very well, then establish trusted long-term relations. This way, you will be confident that the translator is committed to the high level of quality you expect and will not outsource your work to someone unqualified to do it. Otherwise, you are at a great risk of receiving “anonymous” translations made by potentially unqualified people.

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Re: Strategies for quality translations

Roman Mironov — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 06:19:07 -0600

Thank you for this great summary. I could not agree more.

1: Providing training and reference material to the linguistic team before starting translation educates the linguistic team about the content they will be localizing, resulting in better quality translations.

This is indeed essential... but unfortunately happens rarely in my experience. Typically, I have had to find reference materials myself as a translator or editor. There have been even cases when I was provided with Workbench RTF files created from MIFs, but for some reason could not obtain the respective PDF files for reference.

3: If the customer is satisfied with the quality of previous or current projects, requesting that the same team of linguists be used across all projects will help ensure consistency and quality. (For example, this could mean that the same linguists should be used on all projects whether they are software, help or documentation.)

Absolutely. In my experience, the consistency can drop by as much as 50% when the team of linguists is changed. Because translation is inherently subjective and largely depends on individual translator's preferences, new translators often edit the existing translations heavily to make them look more like their own. I have seen only few translators who were disciplined enough to adhere to TM consistently and refrain from editing 100% and high-percentage fuzzy matches.

4: Creating and maintaining project glossaries helps to ensure consistent terminology across projects. It is also helpful if the glossaries contain definitions to help linguists better understand the meaning of each term.

Project glossaries are certainly an excellent way to maintain consistency. Aside from just requesting a translator to use them, it is important to also use them in a terminology checker such as QA Distiller in each job to make sure that the translator strictly followed a glossary. With long-term jobs, the glossary might grow to thousands of words, so this terminology check consumes much time in each job, but in the end of the day this effort is certainly worthwhile.

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Strategies for quality translations

Mimi — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:06:06 -0600

There are several strategies that can take place before the translation, edit and proof phases start to ensure quality translations:

2: If previously localized materials and translation memories (TMs) are available, provide these to the team to use during the translation phase. Linguists can use these materials to reference already translated terminology and ensure consistency.

5: It is useful for linguists to ask questions to and receive input from in-country reviewers who are familiar with the terminology in their locale. This interaction can happen during any phase of the project (for example, glossary review, during the translation and edit phases). Establishing this kind of reviewer-linguist dialog may also reduce the number of in-country review changes later in the project.

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Translators education, backgrounds and experience

Susanne — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:17:25 -0700

When selecting a translation vendor for medical projects, best practices include making sure that the linguists have either an education, background or experience in the medical field. You should be able to depend on the language service provider to select qualified linguists with the appropriate experience to translate medical content. Has anyone had quality concerns when this may not have happened? Do you know for sure that the correct resources are being used on your projects?

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Re: Translation for 'On-boarding'?

Mylene — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:33:20 -0600

Accueil et intégration des employés???

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Translation for 'On-boarding'?

Le Fred — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:27:34 -0600

'On-boarding' refers to a process of bringing an employee on board. This covers quite a bit of ground, it can be anything from language training for a relocated new hire to helping procure a vehicle for the new employee.

Does anybody know how to render this concept in French and/or Spanish?

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