Re. Translation costs

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

     Lawrence (Barybaro?) wrote in response to my posting on translation
     quality:

     <<Employing these extra people [technical experts] surely put up the
     costs. And what about finding an expert in the target language in the
     first place?>>
     Two good points. In our case, the technical experts are already
     employed, so there's no extra cost. And my employer considers
     translation quality important enough to ask these experts to devote
     considerable time to the task of quality control. If you're not lucky
     enough to have this sort of setup, the best possible technical experts
     are your customers: the simplest possible way to do this would be to
     find a single customer with the appropriate characteristics, and ask
     him or her to review the document for you. You can build on this
     simple base to a full-scale documentation usability test if you have
     the time and budget; you should certainly aim in that direction.

     <<When I have finished [translating] Susan does the editing for
     English and proofreading. I never do my own editing or proofreading.>>
     That's a good point. It's damn near impossible to edit your own
     translations (or any of your own writing) as well as someone else can
     do. Time and resources permitting, two pairs of eyes find more errors
     than one pair. If you can't do this, try to build in a 1-week "set
     aside" period. You'd be surprised how much a manuscript changes when
     you haven't seen it for a week.

     I can already hear the rebuttal to this: "Who can afford to wait a
     week?" The answer is simple: it takes just as long to revise a
     manuscript right after you've written it as it takes one week later,
     but you get worse results. In the meantime, do other useful work while
     you wait for the week to pass. If a week sounds too long, try 3 days
     or even a weekend. You'll surprise yourself.

     <<Many a time I have found very serious errors and omissions in the
     original Italian document....if I have the slightest doubt or even
     something that does not seem to *me* to tie up then I ask.>>
     That's exactly how to do it. The translation process and the
     second-language edit often turn up problems that need to be resolved
     in both languages. As an editor, one of my strengths is looking at
     something in a different way from the author and poking holes in the
     author's assumptions; working in a second language helps to provide
     the necessary distance. When in doubt, I always check. Problems often
     arise fairly subtly: for example, something that I thought I
     understood perfectly well when I edited the French version
     substantively suddenly seems not so clear when I have to express it
     precisely in English. (This is a corollary of the teacher's rule: you
     don't fully understand something unless you can explain it to someone
     else.)

     <<Often we are asked to check an English version of a manual or some
     other document. In all cases I ended up not only translating from
     scratch, but once again find faults with the original Italian
     document.  This really makes me feel bad because my client thinks he
     is going to get a better doc for a few quid but ends up paying twice
     for what should have been done correctly in the first place.>>
     I'd only feel bad if I was the one doing the inferior-quality
     translation. As for finding faults in the original, this is just proof
     of the old computer rule: "garbage in, garbage out". You need to
     explain this to your clients: if they don't do any quality control in
     the original, they'll have to do it in the translation. In fact, you
     should be pleased: you're providing considerable extra value to your
     client by doing more than a word for word translation. The value of
     translation comes from reworking the words so that the correct ideas
     move from author to reader; if the ideas are wrong, you can't
     communicate them until you fix the ideas. If all the reader needed was
     a word for word translation, we could be replaced by a good
     dictionary.

     --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
     Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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