Translating documents?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Susie Pearson reports: <<Our company has decided to start translating our
Programmer's guides to Japanese. They are not written using Standard
English, and it's a case where part of the document will remain untouched
(code examples, with the exception of comments, will remain as they are).
The  manager in charge is going to send the documents to a generic
translation company...>>

There's no reason why such a company couldn't do a good job, but sometimes
you really do get what you pay for. A company that specializes in this field
is more likely to know the specialized terms and more likely to use a
translation memory system that will save you lots of money both up-front in
the future. Even if the up-front cost is higher, you may end up saving money
and grief in the long term. That's not to say that bargains can't be found,
but you'll want to be sure your contractor really knows the field and can
give you comparably good service to the pros. If they don't know the field,
you can get some truly barbarous translations--I've seen a few whoppers in
French myself (e.g., the hotel with in-house computer "h**kers"... no
footnote mentioning whether they were dial-up, DSL, or cable hookups).

* Replace the double asterisk with an "oo"; had to do that or else this
message would have been spam-filtered.

<<I was also wondering if perhaps an alternate route would be to hire
someone (possibly a technical writer who speaks Japanese) to do the
translations in-house, on a contract basis?>>

Generally a bad idea. My colleagues in the translation community (and my own
experience*) strongly suggest that a translator's first language must be the
target language for the translation, with very rare exceptions. If you do
hire someone who's translating into a second language, expect to require a
full editorial pass by someone whose expertise is in the second language to
perform quality assurance on the translation.

* Montreal is a largely bilingual city, with many fluently bilingual people
and a bewildering array of the least competent translations I've ever seen.
A large part of my job is French to English translation, and though I'm good
at it, I don't consider myself nearly expert enough to translate _into_
French without lots of help from a good editor.

<<I'm worried about what will be lost/changed through the translation if the
person translating the documents does not have a rough
understanding of the content>>

That's a valid concern, and it's why you should insist on quality control by
native speakers of the language (ideally, editors or audience members expert
in that language). A professional translation firm may include this as part
of the contract, whereas a "generic" translator may not.

<<I'm running into difficulties with technology-specific concepts like cache
manager, cipher suites, classes, etc.  Do I assume
there's an acceptable Japanese translation for everything?  Industry terms
such as SSL, HTML, TLS, etc. -- do they remain as they are, they're not
translated?>>

I'd assume that as in English, there's considerable variation in what
professionals consider to be correct translations. Not having any experience
in Japanese terminology, this is a question you really need to ask a
Japanese programmer proficient in the field.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."--Goethe

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