3 Tips for Successful Foreign Language Translation

Translation of your English text can be a big endeavor.  Keep these translation tips in mind to help you save time, money and confusion.

1.  Keep your target market in mind.  Creating copy for global audiences should not include acronyms, puns, plays on words and national contexts as these will lose impact when they are translated into a foreign language.

2.  Proofread your English source documentation.  This will help the foreign language translator understand your text and prevent delays and confusion.  In addition, be sure to have your translations proofread.  An omitted word, a spelling error, and incorrect punctuation can harm your organization’s reputation in your new market.  First impressions are everything.

3. Translating from English into a foreign language typically means an expansion of text.  Translations typically require more words to communicate the same thing in English.  This concept is called the expansion factor - a 250 English word document could expand to as much as 400 words after translation.  This is important for two reasons.  One - be sure your formatting and layout allows for text expansion - so leave plenty of white space.  Additionally, check with your translation or language service provider charges by source or target word as that will effect your costs. 

Taking the time to translate your documents with these tips in mind can help your organization take their products/services global. 

Translation Memory - Why it should matter to Technical Writers

Translation Memory (TM) systems like Trados and SDLX can help technical content authors reuse their text with matches and save their organization money.

A match refers to segments of text that are the same or similar to previously translated and identified segments of text.  In translation, the segment pairs (source and target languages) are stored and saved in a TM database.  Why is this important?  You can leverage your matches across your documentation whether it is by product year, model or brand. 

• Exact matches are 100% the same - meaning the text segment is exactly the same word for word.  This is also known as repetitions.
• Fuzzy matches are exactly that - a match but only a certain percentage of the words are the same.  This can vary by translation service provider from 70%-99% of a the text must be similar.  
• New - are segments that must be translated from scratch.

The less translation you need the lower the cost and time requirements for you and your organization.  Be sure to think about reusing your text segments so that you can capitalize on cost cutting and saving when you go to translation.   

Myths of Machine Translation

Machine translation has many limitations and I am not a big proponent of complete machine translation but as these systems become more sophisticated, I believe that they do have a place in the translation process.  I read a great article in tcworld on dispelling the myths and bad rap for machine translation. 

Ultimately, most of us have used the free services out there on the net and that is not a true representation of many of the machine translation tools available today.

The free services do not allow users to select a subject field or provide user terminology, they can’t set stylistic preferences or translation parameters other than the specification of desired language pair and the drop in of source text.  Not much to go by.  No wonder there are such problems. Often times what is produced is a word-for-word translation.

The proprietary commercialized machine translation services are usually only utilized in larger organizations.  These systems have cost millions of dollars in research and development. 

Recent facts that dispel some of these myths:

• Machine translation can improve the productivity ands consistency of human translators
• Machine translation enables more translation of materials that would ordinarily not have been translated due to lowered costs and turn around time
• There are many machine translation programs/technologies that are capable of producing translation results in the right environments like rules based machine translation, statistical machine translation and direct machine translation. 
• There are many affordable and user-friendly machine translation packages available for even the smallest of businesses and freelancers.

Machine translation is still a very controversial issue and as a translation agency we will need to utilize and work with this new technology to provide the best value to our customers.  I think there will always be a role for the those with linguistic backgrounds as these systems are meant to be used with human translators.  However, I think in the near future there may be a higher adoption rate of machine translation as more and more technology and sophistication  and solutions are provided to increase efficiency.

3 Tips for Writing Technical Documentation for Translation

If a consumer can’t understand how to use or service your product than what is the point of creating documentation?  Additionally, mistakes here can cause unforeseen liability claims.  By authoring, designing and translating your technical documentation with usability in mind you will have far more success globally.

Issues to consider:

1.  Design: 

• Book form, fan-fold or an innovative sheet fold form. 
• Use of photography and line art instead of text - usually takes up less space and is much more appealing
• Logical and structured format of ideas
• Avoid jargon and overly technical language

2.  Safety aspects and compliance with overseas directives:

• Requirements around the world vary greatly, be sure that your product/documentation is in compliance
• Standards - complies with all laws and safety regulations
• Documentation should be available during the entire life-cycle of the product
• Hazard Analysis - using a hazard and risk analysis to ensure the product does not provide danger to the user
• Target Market Conformity - many countries including the EU require declarations on the technical documentation

3.  Localization:

• Simply translating the documentation is not sufficient as the same words in the same language in different countries can have different meanings
• Source language should be perfect with no errors or mis-spelling
• Use professional translators with technical translation experience and are subject matter expertise
• Use short words/sentences with easy words and expressions, no idiomatic phrases or puns
• Utilize photos with text to help provide context
• Test the documentation with a sample in market audience before full distribution

Last but not least, be sure to utilize consumer feedback on all your documentation.  Even a team of seven reviewers can catch up to 90% misunderstandings in text, process or steps. 

The work you do before you distribute can help prevent miscommunication, liability issues and a bad impression when taking your products global. 

The Basics of DITA

DITA - Darwin Information Typing Architecture is the buzz word in technical documentation and translation these days. 

What exactly is DITA?

An information model/content management system that is used for content-rich and multi-channel environments.  According to Wikipedia, DITA is an XML based architecture introduced by IBM in 2001, to automate creation, authoring, producing and delivering technical information. This DTD system divides content into small, self contained topics that can be re-used in different deliverables and reduces information redundancy.

Three Basic Topic Types:

1.  Task - works for procedures and lists of steps to accomplish a task or outcome. 

2.  Concept - contains definitions, rules and guidelines

3.  Reference - describes command syntax, programming instructions, and other reference material.

Features:

• Modular content vs. long book oriented files
• Topics can be reused in various deliverables
• Allows for conditional text, index markers and topic to topic links based on audience, platform, model, and product
• Structure is similar to HTML which can be used directly in DITA Topics
• Topics are easier to find using an extensive metadata
• End to end architecture using specifications of elements, attributes and rules.

DITA can be used in Windows, Linux/UNIX and Mac OS operating systems. 

Output formats:

1. PDF
2. XHTML
3. HTML Help
4. Eclipse help
5. Java
6. Rich Text Format

The DITA Open Toolkit is an active open-source free DTD that has been contributed to from several companies. 

Translation and localization companies like Iterotext Translation Services can use your DTD files and your XML files to provide multi-lingual documentation.

If you are looking for more information please visit the Toolkit User Guide or the DITA Blog.

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