If your company is thinking of using an individual translator rather than a professional language service provider (LSP), consider some of the advantages of using a professional translation company before taking that next step.
Although individual translators can sometimes offer better prices, a professional translation company can offer competitive prices while still ensuring quality.
Professional LSPs may be more likely to provide free trial translations to help you gauge the level of quality of their finished worked product.
A professional translation firm is far more likely to have set standards for the skills their translation and other company employees must have, as well as criteria for hiring.
Unlike individual translators who may or may not have experience in a given discipline, professional translation services will typically offer subject matter expertise in a much broader range of specialities, such as automobile manufacturing, medical content, and telecommunications.
Because of their more extensive experience and body of work, LSPs usually have comprehensive glossaries and terminology lists as well as the experience in ensuring consistency of terminology across a wide range of documents and outputs.
For any translation work, a critical component to success is good project management and a standard translation process. Professional translation companies have the background in refining their processes to take into account best practices and are able to successfully manage and deliver projects that meet customer requirements, on time and with quality.
Finally, a professional translation company should have the financial resources to ensure their work product and to invest in sophisticated translation memory tools that can help your company save time and money, project after project, by reusing translated content.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Check out "Translation for the Safety Industry" - new article published in the June 2011 issue of Professional Safety magazine.
Companies looking for an edge in competing in a global market need to consider and implement practices that will help improve the quality of their translated content to reach a broad international audience. Some key activities to improving translation quality are:
§Chose a qualified localization service provider (LSP). Look for a company that has experience and a solid base of satisfied customers. Ideally, the LSP should use only qualified translators who are certified by the American Translator’s Association (ATA). Be sure that the translators also have knowledge is the subject matter of your content.
§Follow a defined translation process. From quote through final delivery of the finished products, ensure that the translation process you use includes all of the steps that will enhance quality like using a translation memory tool, and following quality assurance steps.
§Write consistent and clear content with translation in mind. Provide your writers with a company style guide that sets out the grammar and style rules you will follow, as well as the standard terminology your company has chosen. Make sure that your standard terminology will translate well into all target languages.
§Use in-country reviewers or peer translator reviews. Once your content has been translated, ensure that you use qualified reviewers to check the translations against the source English. Reviewers should be native speakers of the target language and be qualified subject matter experts in the type of content.
By following these basic steps, you can expect to see marked improvement in the quality of your multilingual content, which will enhance the professionalism of your product and help your company to achieve its customer satisfaction goals.
In March, ICD exhibited at ConExpo/ConAGG 2011, and here is our International Account Manager's take on the show: ConExpo/ConAGG 2011 lived up to its billing as one of the “Greatest Show on earth”.Exhibitor after exhibitor extremely satisfied with the contacts made. If you have never been to ConExpo, you now have to wait until March 2014. It is worth the cost just to see the “Biggest Sand Box in the World.” www.conexpoconagg.com
Ever wondered what you would do with a portable translation tool? No, this is not a machine translation app. Well, wonder no more. Wordfast has launched Anywhere, the first professional translation memory software application that allows you to translate on the iPad. It is the largest cloud-based translation environment, which is also the fastest growing, there have been approximately 7,000 users since it's launch about 4 months ago.
Moreover, the best aspect of Wordfast is that this new application is free and accessible to all translator. It also claims to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the source content, and all TM content. It has a “software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that allows you to use a translation memory without having to pre-install any software, instead you can just access the application via Safari web browser
Normally you would upload/download files in Wordfast using your main computer. Now, you can translate files (DOC, PPT, PDF, etc.) that are available from the net - by simply using a URL provided by and LSP or client. Once translation is complete, the translated file can be temporarily stored on Wordfast server for three days. You can for example, inform a client or a Project Manager that the file is available, by just providing the URL.
This makes it possible to complete a full job with an iPad, from source file upload to the delivery of the translated file (using a full suite of Translation Memory, glossaries, Machine Translation, etc.), without ever dealing with a local hard disk. You can of course log into WFA from your main computer at any time to upload or download files. With Apple's external keyboard the translation experience is the same as on any other computer.
Some of the key features:
Work in groups and collaborate with other translators. You can set permissions to share memories and work together online
Perform automatic translation integrated and compatible with a wide variety of file types.
Aligning source and target texts for different languages, and create parallel texts from a translation memory.
In short, this application allows you to do virtually everything needed to perform the task of translation. This makes translation more accessible to would-be translators. The limitations of exposing your TM and confidentiality come into question, and this might be a big risk for larger LSPs and their clients, but for small scale translators and small businesses that have in-house employee translators, this could be an easy accessible solution to using a translation memory tool.
