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Subject:What do you brief translation agencies? From:"Jennifer O Neill" <jennifer -dot- oneill -at- village -dot- uunet -dot- be> To:"Techwr-l" <TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 3 Nov 1999 20:14:28 +0100
We've just received some manuals and labels from a well known translation
agency which were translated from English into several Western and Eastern
European languages. Translation and DTP were part of the price. The manuals
were in PM and the labels in Coreldraw.
We're dissapointed with the DTP results: they're not like the English
versions. Some of hte labels were returned in Illustrator, which we can open
in Coreldraw admitedly. Many of the files had font problems. The Polish PM
manual was awful. A couple of PM files we couldn't open.
With hindsight we should probably have told them the fonts we used but then
again they never asked us either so we didn't think about possible problems.
We're annoyed we got files back in a format different from that we gave them
(Illustrator not Coreldraw). My question: in how much detail should you
brief a translation agency when giving them a contract? It seems silly to
tell them we'd like the files back in the same format, or at least so I
thought until now. What should you tell them abouts fonts? I has assumed we
were paying for DTP expertise (which they said) so where did we go wrong in
briefing them? Thanks. We will complain to them.
