Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?

[poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net]

Gene,

To address your second paragraph statement about translations being done best in the country of origin, it ain't necessarily so -- at least not in my case.

At the end of March, I started with a China-based company which makes heavy equipment. The engineering and sales office where I'm located is staffed by about 25 or 30 folks, pretty much split one-half U.S. citizens and the rest native Chinese who are very new to this country; they are all VERY great people and nice to work with; the company is sort of the Caterpillar company of China.

I like what I do and had already worked for some years documenting the same equipment for another other manufacturer. The problem here, though, is this company's practice of producing English-language documentation in China for U.S. distribution; the docs are _horribly_ written because (I've been told) they simply run the Chinese text through a software program and take what they get (so to speak).

The binding and physical appearance of the stuff is great and was done for surely pennies-on-the-dollar compared to what it would cost here. But with apparently no English-articulate personnel in China actually reading the stuff, my coworker and I spend hours and hours trying to decipher the actual intent of the text (it would be nice if it were only misspellings, but it's w-a-y worse than that). Plus, we here also write totally new docs for U.S.-targeted products.

So to re-state, make sure someone over "there" is English-articulate enough to review the translated docs before getting them to you.

Just my 2 cents (yep, they have those in China, too).

-- Kenpo in Atlanta
-------------- Original message from "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>: -------------- 


> By having someone who is knowledgeable in the subject matter *and* a 
> native speaker of the target language review the result (service techs 
> are my favorites). If possible, have the same person on the review 
> cycle for the original English version as well. 
> 
> If possible, I prefer to have my translations done by translators in the 
> target language's country. Not always possible, of course, and if not, 
> I prefer translators who employ people who are native speakers of the 
> target language. 
> 
> Gene Kim-Eng 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare,consultant)" 
> 
> > Does anyone have any tips on how to verify the quality of a translated 
> > document? How do you *know* that the work you get is good, especially 
> > if 
> > you cannot read the translation? 
> > 
> > In a related vein, what are some tricks for picking out a good quality 
> > translation company? 
> 
 
> 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat