Example 1: Last year you paid $17,000 to translate one of your company’s I&O manuals. And you’ve just finished the revisions for Version 1.1. What’s the fastest and most economical way to execute your changes, and save your investment in the original translation?
Example 2: You have to translate a 1.5 million word online operations manual into French. You can’t alter one keystroke of the HTML code. There’s a lot of repetitive text. And, over thousands of linked files, terminology must be consistent – no exceptions.
With a team of seven translators working, how do you:
- Protect the integrity of the code?
- Guarantee terminological consistency?
- Leverage existing translation of repetitive text?
Our answer to those questions, from practical experience: translation memory software. We’ve used all three leading translation memory applications over the years, and decided on the one (TRADOS) that gives you:
- cost savings you can calculate, and budget on
- quality, controlled by standardized terminology
- measurable savings in turnaround time
Revision Management
A high-speed database records all of our translators’ work on your project. Whenever the same or a similar phrase recurs, the software immediately presents the memorized translation as a possible match. Our translator decides: use, edit, or alter the suggested text. So we never translate the same sentence twice. Even in translating the first version of a document, savings are possible; and of course, revised documents make use of every unchanged phrase in the original.
One other advantage: your Translations International Project Manager will use the software’s precision analysis function to quantify repetition, and budget your work. You know before you begin how much saving in cost and time is possible.
We have experience with client savings of up to 30% using this technology. And with one of our clients, ADP-Hayes Ligon, we are working right now to reduce hundreds of thousands of automotive dealership database entries to translation at a keystroke. That, frankly, is a special situation. We’re not there yet, and it will of course still need human editing.
Another example: with 2,500 translators, the European Union has the biggest translation “department” in the world. EU translation officials say that, for certain types of documents, productivity increased by 100 percent after implementation of translation memory software.
Legacy Translation
Please recycle! Your Project Manager will analyze source and target language text, to highlight matching sentences and paragraphs, and generate a file for use by the database in new work. FrameMaker? All of its features are supported, with tags protected even if format adaptation is necessary.
Your Translation Memory is your Property
Glossary building is a related part of this process. Our subject-specialist translators create a permanent record in each language of every term important to your technology, and it becomes a living part of your translation memory.
We use it to assure consistency within a document, and from one document to the next. And we don’t hold your terminology for ransom: the glossary and the translation memory we develop for your project belongs to you.
We’ll do your work in FrameMaker, QuarkXPress, InDesign or PageMaker; Mac or PC; and in various other presentation and graphics formats. Our clients are category leaders who know they are paying a fair price for translation accuracy and dependability.
We are accurate. We deliver on time. You can depend on us, and we trust you to recognize the value in that. Our clients do. Just ask for a reference.