Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
June/July 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter June/July 2007 |
Daniel Doornbos presented a lively talk, peppered with stories from his experience, for technical writers confronted by the challenge of having documents translated. He led the audience through the steps, from convincing upper management to fund the effort through contracting a translation service and quality-checking its work.
Daniel began with three steps a company must take to be successful worldwide:
The fourth step -- not the first -- is translation. Sometimes the tech writer needs to convince management that the company can't go global without translation.
"Because not everyone speaks your language," Daniel emphasized. English is only the third most widely-spoken language in the world, behind Spanish and soundly trounced by Mandarin Chinese, not to mention the languages of India. Customers won't buy a product without documentation they can read. The tech writer may need to keep saying it; Daniel told about having to remind technicians that the button to click for a German version of the company's website ought to read not "German" but "Deutsch."
Internationalization hinges on the technical writer's skill. Like the user, the translator doesn't know the product and needs clear, simple explanations to work with. This means the best technical writing is the most translatable; Daniel recommended making sure that this is the case.
Daniel listed these qualities of translation-friendly documents:
GUIs must have text strings in Message Properties files, not hard-coded into the software.
Because localization is crucial, the company needs translations into the languages customers use. For example, a good translation service distinguishes between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish of Mexico. And locals who can spot differences like these will laugh at what comes from online translation sites. Online sites can help out with a phrase or two, Daniel said, but he showed what happened when he used a site to put the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence into Japanese and then back into English: "When in the course of human events" became "the human it was possible and between thing."
Translation services provide a cost estimate based on the number of words in the project, with a higher charge for more exact matches to the original and lower for what are called "fuzzy matches" in the trade. Daniel shared tips for keeping costs low:
Translators build a translation memory, which is typically a spreadsheet of previously translated terms. Daniel recommended keeping active control of this tool. He told what happened when an engineer, pleased with the term the agency found for "current" in an electrical product, told the agency to use it 100% of the time. The translator made gibberish of code that stamped output with the current date and time.
So you're a native English speaker with a little California Spanish, and the instruction manual has been translated to Japanese, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian and Arabic. How to QC? Help can come from:
Daniel's company, Promise Technology, is based in Taiwan and has many code-writers from India, so he gets colleagues to check some translations, and a linguist examines the rest. Most important, he chooses a translation service he can trust, using clearly defined criteria and a thorough, well-documented agency search. Over the years he's devised a test document that includes a few deliberately ill-written phrases. If the translation company doesn't call to ask for clarification, he keeps on shopping. When upper management asks, "How do you know this text is right?" he can point to a track record of success on languages checked and few or no user complaints.
Sara Greenwald is a technical writer in the Bay Area. You can see her work at users.california.com/~sarapeyton/resume.html.