I think we’ve all been there – you receive a request from a new customer and the project is more complicated than just file A translated from language X to language Y. It’s human nature that we want to show off our best sides and demonstrate our competence from day one. We understand that our customers are busy people, and that translation is our job, not theirs. They want to pass the translation request to their chosen supplier and receive back their requested translations.

Should we ask questions at all?

For this reason, we sometimes feel uncomfortable asking questions in case they give the customer a negative impression. Maybe the customer will think that we don’t have the expertise, or maybe they will think that we’re too much hassle to deal with. However, I come at this from a different angle – maybe the customer will see our questions as confirmation of our commitment to delivering the best service. We are demonstrating that we are paying close attention to their material and are invested in delivering high-quality translations first time. I would even go so far as to say that a sensible question will never reflect badly on the person that asked it.

We are often contacted by potential customers with requests. Some come from our colleagues across the global network of STAR offices. Some are based in the UK and deal directly with us in Guildford. Regardless of which office they contact first, they receive the same service from us, and part of this involves being asked questions.

Saving time and money

In some cases, our questions allow the customer to simplify their workflow. By working in the files in a different format, we might save DTP time. Or, by offering an extra service, they reduce the need for multiple suppliers. In other cases, our questions relate to the translations themselves, whether it is a terminology point, relating to the writing style, or even clarifying some unclear text.

Working with existing documentation

One new customer came to STAR via a recommendation from a colleague in a different department. They had previously been translating training documentation using in-house staff, but were finding that the increased volumes were putting them under too much pressure. Thanks to their in-house team and their existing bank of multilingual documentation, re-use of translation memory was an important consideration. It was important from a financial point of view to keep costs low, but also in order to maintain the tone of voice and preferred terminology. With this in mind, the team were diligent in using the concordance function and checking fuzzy matches. We were also asked to check the existing material for consistency and any errors. So far, so good.

In the case of this customer, it was inevitable that questions would arise. Some related to minor terminology points; such as the difference between a participant handbook or notebook, while some related to the writing style and the use of the active or passive voice. Liaising with our colleagues in Switzerland, we sent these questions to the customer and found that they appreciated our efforts.

These initial questions and answers formed the basis of an updated terminology list and a comprehensive style guide. We know that our customers appreciate our collaborative approach. They are the experts in the material they send us but might not be experts in the translation process. They know that they can trust STAR to ask the right questions.

Trust me on this one, questions don’t make you a nuisance – they show that you care about what you do.

If you’ve ever purchased translation services from a translation agency or a freelancer, the chances are you were charged by the word.  There are other charging models out there – hourly, by the page, by the hour – but word rates are by far the most common. It’s easy to see why – words are easily countable, so both purchaser and supplier can be certain what the cost of a project will be with no nasty surprises.

However, the word rate method of charging often leads to complaint on the supplier side of the “commodification” of the translation services industry, turning a highly-skilled profession which adds significant value into McJob where price is the only consideration. That might be slightly overstating the case but it’s certainly very easy for a purchaser to ask for a penny or a cent off a word price, and in a very competitive market, it’s often difficult for the translation supplier to refuse. Hey, what’s a penny? And if you’ve come down from 12p per word to 11p, surely there’s not much more pain in going down to 10p…

But let’s consider what you are buying for that 12p. Is it really just a word in a foreign language?

NB In all these, we’ll assume you’ve purchased from either a reputable translation agency or qualified freelance translator.

Highly qualified professionals

Most professional translators will have a post-graduate qualification in translation and possibly experience in working in their chosen industry sector – legal, medical, engineering etc. A good translation is not necessarily something that can be achieved by someone who “speaks a bit of French” or even someone who is genuinely bilingual. Translation is a skill that needs to be learned and practised.

Your word price may also include proofreading by a second professional translator – so that’s two highly-trained language experts working on your document.

Local market expertise

Ideally the translator will be a native speaker of the language they translate into and working in the relevant country. They’ll have a good understanding of their industry sector as it operates in their country and will adapt their translation accordingly. Wording that works well in the UK, the US or Europe may be completely inappropriate for the Middle East or Asia. Think of the value this adds to your content, and the trouble it could save you – you’ve not only gone to the trouble of communicating in your customer’s language but you’ve gone the extra mile to ensure you’ve done it as well as possible.

Project management

It’s easy to imagine a project manager at a translation agency is simply there to send and receive emails, answer a few phone calls. The reality, of course, is very different. A good project manager adds considerable value to every project they work on – preparing source files so they’re in the best condition for translation, working with multiple file types, sourcing the best translator for the job (or translators on a multilingual job), answering queries from both translator and client, ensuring delivery is timely and fault-free. The list could be endless but perhaps the most value is added through the relationship a project manager builds with a client. Over a period of time, she will suggest improvements to your processes that will help you get the most out of your translated content, saving you time and money, bringing expertise to your business that you’re unlikely to have.

And all for the price of a word!

Here are some simple tips to help you save time and possibly even money on translation. It’s not just about translation though, these top tips can be could considered best practice whenever you’re writing in Word.

When it comes to preparing a document for your company – be it an important contract or an exciting marketing piece – you could be forgiven for thinking that the words are all that matter. For a translator, however, there are other factors that come into play – most importantly, the layout.

For a translator, it can make quite a difference to the translation if that set of words is a title or a command; if words are dotted around the page, is the translator to understand them as a ‘unit’ or as individual words which could yield an entirely different result if they are translated literally?

For customers, too, the benefits of well-formatted documentation are clear. The use of translation memory (TM) software relies on finding similar or identical matches. If the document is laid out in an inconsistent manner, the TM yield may be less than expected, meaning that customers cannot benefit fully from all that TM can offer.

Here are my top tips for improving your document:

Spellcheck, spellcheck, spellcheck

This may seem like a really simplistic first point to make, but it’s amazing how many people entirely forget to do this, even though they may have spent hours working very hard on producing an otherwise exceptional text.

By simply pressing F7 on your keyboard, you can check for any silly oversights that could potentially cause confusion for the translator, and potentially require reprinting costs for the original text, if the errors are caught too late.

Switch on the “Show/Hide” button

This little button may have entirely escaped your notice, but it can be a life-saver for well-formatted documentation. You will find it on the Home ribbon in Word, in the Paragraph group:

It will show little markers for each of the formatting characters in the document – so spaces will appear as a little dot, so you can see at a glance if you’ve put a double space in between words. It will also show you if you have inadvertently broken a line in two which should actually be one sentence.

It can make the page look rather “busy” when you’re not used to it, but you will soon appreciate the benefits.

Make use of automatic tables of contents

Using the formatting styles on the Home ribbon can be a life-saver. For translators, there isn’t much that fills them with dread quite like fixing a manually created table of contents – languages normally vary in length, sometimes quite dramatically. So chapter 4 in the original document may have been on page 6, but after translation it could be all the way down on page 8 because the translated language is so much longer!

It then will take an age to correct this at the end. But using the different Styles options on the Home ribbon will make this very simple.

Simply apply a Heading style to your chapter title. Word will recognise this and will pick it up automatically when you create a table of contents using the Table of Contents function on the References ribbon.

The Update feature for the table of contents will kill two birds with one stone: firstly, if you ever update your document and add extra chapters, you only have to press Update to rearrange the list and have a perfect table of contents; secondly, for the translation, it will take care of any changes to page numbers, without having to laboriously check to see which page each and every chapter now appears on.

OK, so three very simple things that will make a big difference to your Word document, and will make life much easier for your translation agency (I know, it’s all about us us us!).

If you have any questions about formatting a Word document for translation, let us know at email hidden; JavaScript is required

 

 

When you say you’re a translator, the next question you almost always get is “Ohhh, which language?”. It’s what springs to mind when most people think of translation (apart from booths and microphones and thinking on your feet, but that’s for another post). And of course, languages are an obvious core aptitude for a translator.

However, a less evident though equally crucial skill is the ability to research effectively. A significant slice of your time (unless you’re an absolute expert in the field in question) is spent browsing specialist websites, glossaries, dictionaries and terminology databases (in addition to a healthy dose of general Googling) to locate either the meaning of a term, a date, a name or the contextual or historical information necessary to produce an accurate translation. It’s one of the lovely aspects of the job and it can be really quite illuminating – sometimes inadvertently. With experience, a translator becomes adept at quickly pinpointing the needle of necessary information in the haystack of available data and, as a bonus, such research often leads to the acquisition of much weird and wonderful knowledge that can add a real element of fun and fascination to the translator’s job (or at least make them go “ooh, well I never!”).

To find out more, I conducted a quick “Top 10” survey to find out what gems or surprising nuggets of information some of our in-house translators had unearthed in the last week, and they provided some great examples. For instance, did you know…?

  • An 18th century Italian glass blower created a new material called aventurine when he accidentally dropped a sliver of copper into some melted glass
  • There’s something called Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS) which is caused by excessive use of power tools and can make your fingers turn white
  • Astronomers believe that all meteorites originate from a single celestial body that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago
  • There’s a musical light show in the park grounds of the Museum of Watchmaking in Switzerland that bursts into colour and sound every quarter of an hour
  • There’s an on-board vehicle system that automatically contacts the emergency services in the event of an accident
  • Over the course of the English football season, 380 Premiership matches are watched in 185 countries, in more than 730 million homes
  • In 1967, Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the US Army in protest at the Vietnam war
  • There’s a cooking appliance that alerts you when it’s the perfect moment to flip your steak
  • There’s a charity event called the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride in which men in around 90 countries dress up in dapper clothing and ride classic motorcycles to raise awareness of prostate cancer and men’s health

plus a very long (some might say “heated”) office discussion recently about what to call the things that come out of a volcano…

Naturally, not all jobs are packed with fascinating facts, which makes it all the more lovely when you happen upon them during your work. And there’s a certain satisfaction, when you switch off your computer at the end of a long day’s translation, in knowing that you’ve expanded your general knowledge in the process.

Just try and resist the urge to run home and shout “Guess what I found out today…!”.

It’s a translator thing.