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Doughty, for the translation part of your project, you might wish consider
following.
If you already have a well maintained TM (Translation Memory) in place...
- Avoid rewrite sentences when you reorganise the documentation.
The TM saves translations in sentences (segments) as standard. An identical
sentence in the TM can easily be reused. A better approach than rewriting
might be to choose the best one of existing sentences; it might not be
perfect, but good enough considering the cost of translation into 14
languages.
- Review the TM translated sentences.
If the TM has not been well maintained, the risk is that you ending up with
unusable translations. A not well maintained TM can consist of translations
from a translator using his/hers terminology and writing style completed
2007, and from another translator with different terminology and writing
style completed couple of years later. During a TM translation, "created
by" and "created date" are not taken into account, and the result can be
very messy and confusing.
However, in the latest version of the translation tool (Trados), the
PerfectMatch function has been improved. With this function, previous
documents are attached to the translation project, and during the
pretranslation a sentence (segment) will be classified as PerfectMatch only
if it follows the sequent structure in the previous document. PerfectMatch
reduce the need of review TM translated sentences.
All the best,
Katarina
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