Over the years we’ve seen companies both large and small take a variety of approaches to obtaining translation. While some practices may be understandable for companies that have infrequent and small translation requirements, we’ve run into four practices that often hang on long after some businesses’ translation needs have become regular and extensive, costing money …Read More
No matter what area of business you’re in today, it’s hard to keep up with the accelerating pace of technological change. The onslaught of new devices, new apps, and new tech buzzwords never seems to end. Translation services are certainly no exception. If you pay even a modest amount of attention to the news, you’ve …Read More
The back translation and reconciliation process that I described in my post from last week is not an exact science. The following guidelines for client review of back translation can help to ensure a speedy and efficient back translation and reconciliation process. Leave linguistic details up to the translation team. Remember that word order and …Read More
What is Back Translation? Although we have the utmost confidence in our linguists, who are carefully evaluated for their expertise in specific subject domains, we are occasionally asked to include an additional validation step called a “back translation” in our workflow. A back translation can be defined as the translation of a target document back to …Read More
Pre-release testing of software and pre-live testing of websites are common practices to make sure that everything looks right and all the functionality performs as expected. What some people don’t realize is the importance of performing that same kind of testing on all localized websites and software. There is a tendency to focus too much …Read More
Everybody wants a translation to be perfect. The translator, the project manager, and of course, the customer. Quality Assurance is the term of art we use for getting as close to perfect as possible. Since nobody has unlimited time to check and recheck translations for accuracy, we’ve developed a systematic process for identifying any errors that …Read More
Are you in the process of choosing a language service partner (LSP) for your ongoing translation needs? It may seem like a good idea to request samples or test translations from several candidates, then choose based on who did the best job. However, this approach is not a reliable means of gauging translation quality. Here are …Read More
Having your translation project reviewed by a qualified in-country reviewer is a great idea in many cases, especially where your material is aimed at a specialized audience or industry. Even the best professional translators may not know everything about your particular field, so a final review might be recommended. But without the proper planning and reviewer selection, …Read More
Update 6/1/2017: The issues discussed in this post are more relevant to Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), which is how Google Translate used to work. The advent of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) makes my theory a moot point. But you should still be wary of machine translation for essential business publications. Last week, when translating from Russian into …Read More
One of the greatest challenges of a localization project manager is managing quality for a wide range of languages and subject matters. It is impossible for one person to be fluent in hundreds of languages and domains. The importance of an objective translation evaluation rubric is paramount for the success of a multilingual localization agency. …Read More
