Simplification

When you have hundreds of pages of text to be translated, please take a moment to reconsider. Is it actually necessary to translate all of the pages, or would it be possible to translate an abbreviated version? A quick consultation with your contributors to decide what information is indispensable is always a good idea. A little effort at an early stage may save considerable expenses later on. Elaborate descriptions and bombastic statements on internal affairs can often improve a text by being deleted. Internal trade terminology should always be used sparingly unless you are 100% certain who your target readership is.

Last year a large technical company sent a 500-page user’s manual to Translogic, asking to have it simplified and finalized. The result was a reduction of some 230 pages before the translating itself had started, and the outsourcer was surprised to find that the manual turned out to be an even better product following the trimming.

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Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

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Machine translation – Computer Assisted Translation

Some customers of http://www.translogic.no/ ask for software that can translate the text directly on their PC. In case you need to translate a segment of text solely for your own use, machine translation may be of some assistance. It is quick and inexpensive; some services are even free of charge, like http://www.freetranslation.com or http://babelfish.altavista.com These are not suitable for serious translation – the result will make you appear to be inarticulate or just plain stupid. For an amusing trial run, you might try to have your PC translate some text from English into a foreign language, then to a third language, and then back into English. Having seen the result, I can guarantee that you will not want use such text to address your customers. That said, the latest addition, Google translate, is actually quite good for personal use.

Careful editing of a machine translated text by a skilled linguist is an alternative, but it will not save you any expenses overall. Most linguists will tell you that a machine translated text is so bad that it would be quicker and less expensive to do the job over again manually.

Several software companies, of which Trados, Déjà Vu and WordFast, are the best known, have developed software to assist translation agencies and translators in their work. Such software can be valuable time-savers when translating repetitive texts. The greatest advantage though, is that the software makes it easier to ensure consistency throughout the translation, i.e. repeated terms or expressions will be translated the same way in all documents. This is called CAT (Computer Assisted Translation)