Tips For Your In Country Review Process for your translated documents

Reduce your translation costs and reduce headaches in your international communication process.  In-country (or client review as many translation agencies call it) review is one of the most crucial, yet challenging, steps in the translation process.

In-country review is the process of sending translated material to an individual in the target language country to review linguistic concerns associated with a given translation project. For example, industry or company specific terminology. The reviewer is generally a co-worker from your organization who resides in the country  and most often a sales manager, country manager or distributor. To ensure a successful review process, follow these guidelines:

1. Create Goals of In-Country Review for your organization and your documents.  The overall goal should be to gain local acceptance for the product/service or product/service materials in the target market.

2. Decide who would perform the reviews? Ideally reviews should be performed by individuals with a linguistic background, solid product knowledge and previous review experience. However, review is more often performed by local sales staff or distributors who have a vested interest in the translation quality, but no formal review experience. Therefore it is critical that a clear set of guidelines or instructions be provided to ensure consistent and timely feedback from reviewers. Guidelines become even more important if you plan to have more than one person per language conduct the review. Your translation supplier should be able to assist you in developing your product/service specific guidelines.  Be sure to do this as far in advance of a project as possible.  In addition, establish delivery dates for when reviewers will receive materials for review and when the reviewer’s comments are due.  Please try to prevent reviewers who tend to make many minor and often just personal preference changes vs. major linguistic and terminology changes.

3. Achieve excellent in-country reviews.

• The first step in this process is creating glossaries and style guidelines before translation starts. This step will establish preferred terminology, usage of acronyms, punctuation, etc. Glossaries and style  guides enable translators to choose preferred terminology and style at the outset of a project. Involving your reviewers in this process will enable them to provide input at the outset and minimize the number of revisions later. Why is this so important? There is often more than one way to correctly express a concept or idea and without guidance on key terminology, a good translation that is faithful to the original text may not reflect the preferred expressions of your in-country staff.
• The next step is to help your reviewers understand the purpose and focus of the review process by providing them specific parameters and guidelines for their review process.  Items like adherence to the glossary and style guide, consistency of the translation, compliance with instructions (I.e. items that should not be translated are correct), country-specific measurements and other standards are met, accuracy of terminology, and style.

4. Determine how review comments should be provided? Depending on the source files or document, there are different ways to capture reviewer comments; however, the original translated text must remain in the translated document. A reviewer can make suggestions and comments using the change tracking feature. If they are using an application that does not support change tracking such as Excel, Quark, PowerPoint, etc. they may be able to designate their comments in another way such as using a different colored font. Reviewers may also use a separate document to communicate comments. In this case it must be very clear to which text the comment relates. This will minimize follow
up queries from your localization vendor and save time in the process. If you must use multiple reviewers per language, it is best if the client coordinates and consolidates the reviewers’ comments into one single document before sending to the vendor. Reviewer comments should be as clear and specific as possible.  Reviewer comments should arrive prior to any formatting (DTP) activities for printed materials and prior to testing for software, web or help materials. A delivery schedule should be agreed at the outset of the project to allow translators adequate time to implement the changes.Your localization vendor will implement the changes where valid. For some changes, particularly in the case of stylistic preferences of the reviewer, it is helpful for your vendor to have your reviewers available to answer any questions that may arise during comment implementation.

Just like most other business functions, the in-country review process can go smoothly if planned in advance, when expectations are clearly set and communicated, and when scheduled realistically.  The in-country review can be a powerful means to ensure the success of your product in international markets.