Question and Answers

How to make a successful translation?

Translation buyer's side

• Several conditions must be met to make your translation successful:
  Considering that the translation will always have a zooming effect on imperfections and/or errors, the original document should show a good writing level.
• Whenever you use desktop publishing and you wish to obtain a wygiwyg translation, it is absolutely necessary to make the document available in its native format ( a Pdf file or a printout cannot be used to preserve the original layout at a reasonable cost.
• You should also consider assigning to a technically competent person the responsibility of receiving and answering the possible translator's questions.
• In accordance with the principle that says that no one should control himself, you should assign proofreading to a third party.

Translator's side

• In all cases, the translator must be modest and not commit himself to translating documents related to unfamiliar domains, or at least he should be aware that his learning efforts will need a long and hard personal investment, and that the first translations in a new domain are probably not going to be profitable.
• He should also work in a modern environment (data system with dictionaries, translation database, computer-aided translation system, desktop publishing software).
• He should maintain archives for all his translation work and he should be able to deliver the translation on various standard media according to what his customer asks, e.g. Internet, diskettes, ZIP cartridges, CD-ROM etc. DVD ROMs are not yet necessary because the translation files associated with a single order can usually be written on a single CD-ROM and that DVD readers can read CD-ROMs.
• He should have at his disposal all the linguistic background necessary to eliminate translation uncertainties (dictionaries, spell checking software, etc.), also he should never hesitate to contact the competent person by his customer.
• He should always ask his customer about specific terminology and he should also familiarise himself with the customer's document/writing style.
  
  
  

How can you estimate translation time?

• Usually a translator can translate from 10 to 25.000 characters per day (including the time necessary for searching unknown terms or expressions and understanding the involved technical background) depending on the intrinsic document difficulty. For technical documentation this is roughly equivalent to 6 to 15 standard size pages (around 250 words).
• Most of the word processors and desktop publishing software include some character counting routine. This can help you to evaluate the number of days/man required to achieve the translation work.
  
• According to the size of the document, you should also decide whether you work with a single translator or a team. For a short document (up to 50.000 characters), your translation will seldom have problems to be inserted in a freelance competent translator work flow.
• For bigger documents, the teamwork has the advantage to shorten the translation time. However, you should be aware that the necessary time is not inversely proportional to the number of people, except when it is possible to cut the text into as many independent pieces than required by the team headcount.
  It can be envisaged to translate 1000 pages in a few weeks. However, it is not realistic to multiply too much the number of translators if you wish to keep a certain consistency.
  
  
  

Literary or scientific knowledge?

Does automated translation work?

• The answer is yes, if you first take a great care in setting up the software with appropriate parameters  which is very often the same as choosing in advance between various ways of translating a word or an expression i.e. substantially prepare the software work  and if your objective is limited to a global understanding of the text. The biggest advantage is the huge execution speed of the translation process. However, the result of such a translation can in no way be directly published.
• The answer is no, if you wish to obtain an acceptable result after a reasonable amount of proofreading and correction time. Our experience shows that the translator spends more time in proofreading and in implementing the corrections than what he needs to make directly his own translation.

• Both of them offer a professional environment fully dedicated to translation, with simultaneous display of source and target text, with and/or without typographical enrichment, with online background real-time working translation database and multilingual dictionaries; the databases are enriched automatically during the translation process, or separately.
• The translation database is made of text pieces called segments which are initially pre-cut from the source text at the importation time. Those segments and their translated - possibly multilingual - counterparts are building the database. Obviously the system keeps track of the translation equivalent segments. At the beginning of the new translation process, the source text is cut into segments and the database is searched for similar segments; it is always possible to set a similarity threshold for translation validation.
• Both software provide multilingual dictionaries which are fed "interactively" by the translator, but that can alo be fed automatically.
• The biggest difficulty is to transform the source document format (Word, Wordperfect, RTF, PageMaker, FrameMaker, QuarkxPress etc...) into a common format which can be handled by the user interface. Specialised filter are in charge of this work, but the amount of work necessary to get a suitable result cannot be neglected. Both suites exist in stand-alone (special freelance) or network versions with centralised database.

• Small documents obviuosly require only one person. For more important volumes, the team seems to be a better choice, because it implies a time gain.
• Teamwork can nevertheless give good results only if it is really organised around such a team concept, i.e. if the translation &terminology; databases are fed with new entries in real time and that each translator benefits from a permanent connection. There must be also some kind of permanent dialog between the translators to adopt common positions if opinion differences arise. This is perfectly reallistic when the team is integrated in the company which takes over the global translation responsability; it is much more questionnable if this company works with external frelance translators (which is often the case) to balance workload needs. This last strategy brings however more flexibility in case of urgent translation. Considering the choice agency/freelance, obviously the freelance translator should always have a cost advantage.

• Shorter response time for large volume translation.
• Translators can specialise on specific parts of the document according to their own background and experience.

• The translation consistancy is more questionnable.
• When the team is too large, the time gain drops very quickly because the team is self generating extra synchronisation and coordination work.

• The translation consistancy is maximised.
• The translator shows a stronger motivation because he conducts 100 % of the translation.

• The response time is higher for large documents.
• If the document consists of several parts related to different domains, a risk of lower quality translation exists.

• The ability to process large volumes.
• La permanence of a company.

• Agencies actually widely subcontract to freelance translators.
• The price is higher by 20 to 40 % than freelance's price (wygiwyg cost comes often on top of it).

• The direct relation increases flexibility and encourages fidelity.
• For the same service, the price is remarkedly lower.

• Working on very large volumes is impossible.
• A temporary difficulty can always be envisaged (illness, vacation).
  
  
  

The Pdf format (Portable Document Format) is a data file format which has been designed by Adobe (http//www.adobe.com) to facilitate file distribution, quality visualisation and printing for all kinds of documents. Its utilisation has become universal, many files using this format are found on the Web, mainly for product brochures. This format is also very interesting for technical documentation preview and distribution because it has intrinsic strong qualities: