Professional Translation Services: Adding Value
Professional Translation Services: Adding Value to the Professional Translation Process
By: L. Amado 01/15/2010
The ability to help the translation services customer identify his/her needs must be a key component of the services offered by any successful professional translation services company.
Most business owners like to work with the premise that “the customer is always right.” In some cases it is very wise to follow such a principle, but one should keep in mind that there are circumstances where this principle could lead to potential problems. Here’s an example: The problem within the professional translation services business is that many times the customer simply does not know enough to identify his/her needs and may ask the translation services provider to complete a task in a manner that could potentially cause some problems for the customer down the line.
Professional translation service companies deal with one of the most deceivingly simplistic services: languages. As we said before, due to the fact that they use them everyday and that everybody has mastered at least one, people tend to believe that dealing with languages requires no special skills or expertise. Too many individuals pretend to be linguistic experts and many translation services customers have learned this lesson the hard way. Language translation projects for businesses should only be performed by professional translation services experts.
We have all seen it before in this line of business. Clients who request the professional translation of a document to the wrong target language for the country or region in question; clients who insist on using incorrect or, worse still, made up terminology for their translations; clients who have no regard for consistency; etc.
It is our job as professional translation services providers to educate and to help the client make the best choices. Our aim should be to add as much value as possible to the professional translation process and be much more than just professional translators. After all, this is what we do for a living. We know the business far more than they ever will.
A truly professional translation services company has to become a professional linguistics consulting services provider and offer clients a complete menu of professional linguistic or language-related services, in which professional translations by certified professional translators is just one of the items.
A truly professional translation services company has to be able to accurately tell the client what target language (or even language variety or regional dialect) is the best option for the specific country or region in question, so as to maximize the benefits from the translation effort.
For example, it would be inappropriate to use European Spanish for the Latin American market and vice versa. The same fact applies to European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese as well as the wide variety of French parlance used in France, in North America and various parts of the world.
A truly professional translation services company has to emphasize before the client the importance of following the well-established standard rules and terminology of the target language or dialect, the impact of consistency (or lack thereof), and so on.
A truly professional translation services company has to be more than just a professional service vendor to the client. It has to become a partner. Cliché, you say? Perhaps, but it is important to remember that it is not a matter of altruism or empty rhetoric. Becoming a partner to our clients makes perfect business sense, whether we deal with professional translation services or not.
Professional translation services providers such as ASTA-USA Translation Services (www.asta-usa.com) and its legal division Legal Translation Solutions (www.legaltranslationsolutions.com) recognize that developing a professional business partnership with their clients and adding value to professional translation services significantly increase the chances of success for all parties involved.
http://www.documenttranslationservices.net/
Language translation quality assurance
Professional Translations Services And Quality Assurance
Professional Translations Services: Some Thoughts on Translation Quality Assurance
By: L. Amado 01/14/2010
As is the case with any professional production process, one of the key components of any successful professional translation service is an accurate and consistent translation Quality Assurance (QA) process.
This may seem like a quite straightforward issue, but it is not. It is important to keep in mind that we are dealing with languages, and languages are not an exact science, they are subjective.
I am firm believer in the principle that anything that can be measured can be improved. The question is: How can we measure the quality of professional language translations? We know that from a language translation quality point of view, at the end of the translation process it is not enough to have generated a piece in the target language equivalent in word count to the piece in the source language.
The aim with language translation Quality Assurance should be to provide a measure as objective as possible of the quality of the professionally translated material, according to some predefined criteria.
For example, if the client provided a specific style guide and a list of terminology or glossary to be used, language translation Quality Assurance should measure adherence to that reference material. It goes without saying that it should also account for adherence to language-specific grammatical, semantic, stylistic and usage rules.
Any correction that is not strictly a linguistic error or does not contradict the reference material provided by the client is not an error but a preference (such as choice of words) and should be treated as such for language translation Quality Assurance purposes.
I am in favor of using a very simple Pass/No Pass (or Pass with Errors) rating system for the language translation Quality Assurance process, with reviews of 100% of the translated material if dealing with smaller professional translation projects or a sampling system, when dealing with professional translations projects with larger word counts.
When dealing with a sampling system for the language translation Quality Assurance process, as a general rule, the material translated by more experienced certified professional translators, or certified professional translators who consistently get higher QA scores, should require smaller samples than the material from less experienced certified professional translators or certified professional translators with lower QA scores.
Pass simply means that there are no translation or language errors as per the specified criteria and that the professionally translated material is ready for delivery to the client.
No Pass (or Pass with Errors) means that there are translation or language errors that have to be addressed before the material can be considered ready for delivery.
Simply correcting the translation and/or language errors in the translated material is not enough. The aim should be to act proactively and prevent them from happening again. Every recurring error should be documented in the professional translation services company internal style guide for the language (or project) in question.
In general, professional translations projects with larger word counts or from recurring translation projects or clients require project specific internal style guides and/or glossaries.
Professional translation services providers such as ASTA-USA Translation Services (www.asta-usa.com) and its legal division Legal Translation Solutions (www.legaltranslationsolutions.com) understand that it is impossible to systematically deliver professional translation services without such translation language Quality Assurance processes in place.
http://www.toptranslationagency.com/
Professional Translation Services: Scalability Matters
Is it possible to provide professional translation services at an industrial scale?
One of the most revolutionary aspects of the Industrial Revolution was the achievement of scale. Scale is one of the most effective ways to reduce the price per unit. The bigger the scale of production, the less expensive the product or service.
Here’s an interesting question which I am sure has occurred to you before. Is it possible to provide professional translation services at an industrial scale? Is a professional translation services operation scalable without significant loss of quality? This is no doubt related to the question whether translation of documents from one language to another is an art or a professional activity (or both).
I worked for almost ten years for the world’s second largest software company. I started in the early 90s as a lowly document translator, progressed to Team Leader, Language Translation Specialist and finally Senior Language Translation Specialist.
The company translated hundreds of thousands of words (sometimes over a million) per software version to some 19 languages (from Spanish – European and Latin American – to Korean and from Catalan to Arabic). Language Translation Specialists were responsible for all linguistic aspects of the localization to the target language (localization involves customizing software and documentation for a particular country; it includes the translation of such things as fields, menus, forms, reports, etc. as well as changes to accommodate different alphabets, cultures and legal systems). My group was in charge for translation involving Latin American (LA) Spanish.
Now, LA Spanish may look very nice in a budget estimate, but let me assure you from the onset that it is not a real language. LA Spanish is an abstraction, it simply does not exist. There are very important stylistic and terminology differences among the Spanish speaking countries in the region.
Language translation specialists for each of the target languages were responsible for all linguistic aspects and worked closely with translation services vendors in the target countries.
It goes without saying that the only way to successfully translate hundreds of thousands of words to 19 different languages in a matter of months is to approach the whole exercise as an industrial process. There’s very little room for the “translation as art” school of thought.
The fact that we dealt with a very specific and limited field and that up to a certain extent we could control the source material was a huge advantage. Some of the key success factors were the provision of very clear and comprehensive glossaries and style guides to the translation services vendors and having in place a very efficient QA process for all translation projects. In a way, we had to limit the natural creativity of the professional translators working for us. We had to aim at having a unique translation per English term so as to minimize the possibility of error.
After all, language is convention.
But the single most important factor, the key to our success, was working with professional translation services companies.
Our professional translation services vendors had to be able to provide scalability. They had to have the capacity to simultaneously translate hundreds of thousands of words into some 19 languages – such as Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Greek, Hungarian, Finish, Hebrew and Chinese – in a matter of months.
It is simply impossible to achieve that level of professional translation services working with a few uncoordinated independent translators or small single-language translation vendors.
Mission critical means that a professional translation service company has to be able to deliver the highest quality according to schedule, even if a translator gets ill, the systems crash or the building is affected by an earthquake. Scalability means that they have to be able to do it working with a 40,000 word project, or a 400,000 word project, or even a 4 million word project.
To the best of my knowledge, there are very few professional translation services companies in the world able to provide that level of professional translation services. During the course of my professional translation career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a vast number of professional translation service providers and I can tell you that not all translation service providers can provide scale and quality simultaneously. Two years ago, I began work with ASTA-USA Translation Services (www.asta-usa.com) and their legal division Legal Translation Solutions (www.legaltranslationsolutions.com) and I can tell you that I feel very fortunate to be associated with a professional translation services provider that can put scale and quality together so seamlessly.
By: L. Amado 01/12/2010
