TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?
Subject:Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations? From:Dossy Shiobara <dossy -at- panoptic -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:03:17 -0400
No, I don't have a representative sample doc to share, but I have used
this to "spot check" a translation by taking a few random samples and
asking a friend who speaks the language fluently to translate it back
into English.
On 7/27/09 9:19 AM, Dan Goldstein wrote:
> Do you have an sample of technical documentation that was translated by
> this method? It sounds expensive, time-consuming, and (as Peter pointed
> out) not even that accurate.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dossy Shiobara
>> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 4:39 PM
>> To: Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare, consultant)
>> Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>> Subject: Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?
>>
>> Hire someone else to complete the round-trip of the
>> translation: provide them the translated text, and ask them
>> to translate it into the original language.
>>
>> In other words, you need to have two separate translators.
>> You give the first translator the source material and ask
>> them to translate from language X to Y. You give the second
>> translator the output from the first translator, but ask them
>> to translate from Y to X.
>>
>> If the output of the second translator is reasonably close to
>> the original source material, then it's probably reasonable
>> to assume that the translation was faithful.
>>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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-
