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Translator research in global-scale translationI found an interestng blog entry today by Ivete Camargo López. It was part of her series on Sacred Cows of translation – this one was “translators research“. Ivete did a great job of describing how challenging it can be for a generalist translator to translate specialist materials if the localization company doesn’t support them with glossaries and other materials.
I couldn’t agree more with Ivete here. Translation companies have to take responsibility not just for the project management of localization but for ensuring that translators have everything they need to perform their tasks. Most of my work with is with global companies who routinely translate our to 10, 25, 50 or more languages. The problems Ivete highlights are exacerbated in global-scale localization where the same terms are to be translated by so many translator teams spread around the world. For this type of localization the translation company should be providing complete documentation on all the terms and concepts for each of the translators involved along with all the other supporting materials. If they don’t, the likely result is inconsistency between languages since each translator will need to perform their own research and come to their own conclusions. Obviously there are software products that can help – SDL’s MultiTerm is a good example but for anyone who is in the process of assessing vendors – especially if the candidate pool includes some of the smaller players – I always recommend questioning the capabilities for central research and distribution. I will certainly be looking out for Ivete’s next Sacred Cows entry! 2 comments to Translator research in global-scale translation |
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Hi David,
I just discovered your blog after checking the cross-references of my blog.
I just wanted to comment that, even though I posted this second “sacred cow” about the importance of translation edition, my latest interview/chat with an industry expert basically proposes the opposite, almost the elimination of reviewers/editors, so we all have all kinds of ideas about this.
Anyway, I am adding your blog’s link to my list of recommended blogs, as I have found some very interesting ideas here, too.
Cheers,
Ivette
http://lapsustranslinguae.wordpress.com/
Hi, thanks for an interesting post!
I think another, and related, part of the problem, is that project managers ofen have no knowledge of the target language we as translators turn in.
They might use some term mining tool like SDLs MultiTerm Extract to come up with a list of terms that aren´t really terms. I´ve had jobs where everything from prepositions to adverbs to actual terms were included in a termbase I absolutely HAD to follow (otherwise the PM, who had no knowledge of my target language, Norwegian, would come after me with QA-reports stating that I had not used the terminology correctly). Needless to say, complying with term lists such as this makes the language in my translation extremely cumbersome and not exactly fluent and idiomatic.
So I think that a misguided effort to bring as much terminology as possible to the translator might be worse than not giving the translator anything at all. Also, if a review is really just a QA check that is run against a term base, very funny results might be the outcome. Sadly this kind of “review” seems to be taking over – as you point out a review by a (human!) specialist with the target language as a first language, should ideally be the case.
Håvard