As the global economy expands, American companies are translating large numbers of documents into multiple languages. As a technical writer, my job is to read documents in German, Italian, Danish, French, Spanish, Greek, and Polish among other languages. I also review documents in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but the process is harder and less productive.
This article will provide a few practical tips for "proofing" translations of Western documents.
But you don’t understand German, Italian, Danish, etc.!
Of course I don’t!
That is why a reviewer fluent in each language examines these translations for linguistic mistakes, and then has the translator correct them. By the time I view these documents, they should be correct translations.
What I do is "proof" these translations against the English source material. My goals are to verify that all of the content is present and to find any presentation mistakes that could make the documents harder to understand.
• Find out which terms are not supposed to be translated. This typically includes common product names such as Microsoft Windows,”technical terms, interface buttons such as exit or enter, document titles, and so on. Do not expect the list to be the same for each language—the instructions for the Swedish translator may differ from those for the Japanese one.
• Verify if any screenshots, graphics, or diagrams are supposed to be localized.
• Make sure that you have the most up-to-date English source document.
• Obtain a copy of any changes that the linguistic reviewer made to the translations.
• If you have several documents for the same product (user manuals, quick start guides, installation guides, and so on.), keep them handy during the proofing process. If a proofing question arises in the user guide, you may find the answer by looking at the installation manual.
• Create a comfortable and productive proofing process. Print either the English source or translated document and view the other one on your screen. If you are proofing a 500-page translation, you don’t want to be switching screens between English and Russian all afternoon.
Your primary goal in proofing a localized document is to confirm that all of the approved content is present. This job might be very difficult in a translated novel or an article with page after page of text paragraphs. However, a technical document with its variety of headings, lists, warnings, and other style forms is much easier to proof.
Here is the basic strategy:
• Count and match everything you see. If the English source has ten bullet points in a list, make sure the Portuguese translation matches it. If the English source has five paragraphs after a particular screenshot, verify that the French version matches it. Also count and match table of contents entries, headings, footnotes, table rows and columns and so on.
• Compare the lengths of sentences and paragraphs. You will naturally see variations because languages such as German, Italian or Spanish generally require more words than English to express an idea. However, if a sentence is overly long or short, it may mean some content is left out.
• Look for content that may be obliterated by formatting. If the translator changes the size of a text box in a graphic, some of its text may be accidentally cut off. Or if the translator tries to insert seven lines of German into a table field sized for four lines of English, some of the German text may not be displayed.
• Look for cut and paste mistakes in English terms and phrases. For example, if a translator decides to cut and paste “Acme Software Company” 30 times in a translation, he or she may inadvertently cut existing text one or two times.
• Trust your instincts. If a translated paragraph seems somehow incomplete, or if it seems to conflict with text you saw three pages ago, check the inconsistencies.
• Your secondary goal is to find any mistake that could interfere with the reader’s comprehension of the document , such as inconsistent punctuation or capitalization, formatting errors, obvious spelling mistakes, or trademark policy violations.
• Follow your company’s guidelines for presenting trademarked names. For example, the Acme Company guidelines may require that its name always appear in bold print and caps next to a trademarked product name—“ACME AB400 Software.” However, if the text says “Acme makes software,” no bold print or caps would be necessary.
• Trademark guidelines may also restrict the use of prepositions in a product name. For example, the French translator might translate “ACME AB400 Software” into “logiciel AB400 de ACME.” This use of “de” would violate the guidelines. The correct translation would be “de logiciel AB400 ACME.”
• Watch for a particular language’s rules in punctuation and capitalization. For example,
• French puts a space between a word and a semi-colon.
• German capitalizes all nouns and words used as nouns.
• Spanish places an inverted question mark at the beginning of a question.
• Italian does not capitalize the days of the week or the months of the year.
• Look for inconsistencies in punctuation and capitalization. For example, if a list of bullet points on page 11 has commas, but a similar list on page 12 does not, you need to find out why. Likewise, if the German word “hinwig” (note) carries a colon on page 20, but not on page 35, you have to find out why.
• Check for broken and mislabeled links. For example, the Acme software manual says “To see a diagram on page 10, click here.” However, in the Italian translation, the diagram is on page 11. The translator may fix the link, but forget to revise its text.
• Check all units of measure. Have all the inches been converted into centimeters, all the Fahrenheit degrees into centigrade, all the dollars into Euros? Are the numbers supposed to be rounded up? Does the translator use centimeters on page 5, but millimeters on page 6 for the same measurement?
• Check the headers and footers. The translator may have forgotten them or assume they weren’t supposed to translated.
• Look over terms that appear both in English and the foreign language. Does the English term come first or does the Danish translation? If two terms in a list of ten are not translated, is there a reason why?
Proofing a translation you cannot fully understand is a process that often borders on frustration and guesswork. However, a technical writer can still effectively check translated documents for missing content or presentation mistakes.
Published with the author's permission.
Roger Ribert is experienced in localization and technical writing. He can be reached at rogermr@frontiernet.net. |
