Language translation has become a high-demand service as a result of globalization and legal and regulatory requirements, leading to a high interest in language translation technology.
Like any other process, there are essential elements of a good language translation project that you need to recognize if you want to succeed.
If you’re about to start your first or most important language translation project, you need to consider and focus on the following elements to ensure that you produce a successful, quality translation.
Understand the project’s purpose
Before starting a language translation project, you must first make a plan and think about its purpose. What is the nature of the document you need to translate? Once you have the answer to this question, you’ll also need to consider the target audience. Is it a general audience that will struggle with understanding technical jargon? Or, would a high-level translation better convey the message? When dealing with different audiences, you will need to translate the same information differently to get the message across better.
Finally, you’ll also need to determine the language combination. What language(s) should you translate it into? Should you take any dialects or cultural identities into account?
Choose your tools
When starting a language translation project, you must think of ways to increase productivity and improve the translation process. A great way to achieve this is to make use of machine translation software to streamline the translation process and reduce the amount of time it takes to translate documents.
As a translator, using this type of tool can provide you with instant translations, help you handle vast amounts of content quickly, translate content into multiple languages, and speed up your workflow. All of these advantages make the translation processes more efficient because you will only need to edit the copy that the machine translation software translated. This involves verifying the accuracy of the translation and making sure it sounds natural.
When choosing a machine translation software, keep in mind that there is no one-tool-fits-all solution and the best approach is to try several ones and use each for their strengths in terms of language pairs, subject matter, etc.
Detail the project requirements
The next step is to scope the project requirements and see what type of content you should translate. Is it a video, a manual, a website, a book, or an app? Because of technology needs, you might have digital and non-digital formats before you that need some redesign or reform to target your destination. You might also need to consider future-proofing because you might have, let’s assume, a physical manual that may need to go online and be in a digital format later on.
The scope is an important aspect because the size of the project might be much bigger than you initially thought, and this may increase your costs. You might need to consider phased implementation to manage parts of the translation project and have several release increments to conduct marketing testing before refining and having the final release.
Set a clear deadline
One thing you should pay attention to is establishing a reasonable deadline for the translation project. You should consider factors such as terminology and the requirements of a niche industry or high-targeted audience. The best tactic is to prepare and plan to get on-time delivery without compromising the quality of the final product.
Your success will greatly depend on your commitment to planning with the detailed project requirements so that you can have enough time for proofreading, any necessary modifications, multiple translations, changes in scope and formats, and so on. Bearing this in mind will ensure productivity, speed of delivery, as well as effective translation.
Translation formats
Aside from the working languages and the specialized knowledge necessary to do your job, you must have technical skills to meet customer requirements. You must consider different formats of translation before starting a project.
You may have translation requirements that necessitate a special format for disability needs such as extra-large texts, Braille, etc. You could also come across transcription projects that require you to know the length, quality, and format of the audio, as well as multilingual voice-overs, which change how the project will look because you have to think about the style, language, etc. of the voice-over.
In closing
Before the translation process can even begin you must consider certain elements that can help you manage the project to completion. Keep these five elements in mind when planning your language translation projects as creating a plan, using a machine translation software solution, and detailing and managing deadlines can be crucial to a translation project’s overall success.
