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Ashok Mathur wondered: <<I have been approached by two of my clients
if I could assist them in the task of translating some of work that I
have produced. The language pairs that they are intended are
English : German and English : Japanese for the moment. There is some
interest in English : Swedish also... They are in a hurry and want my
inputs if they should consider machine assisted translation?>>
The "in a hurry" bit sets off all kinds of alarm bells. You can't
rush translation, and you particularly can't rush it if nobody
planned for the translation right from the start of the writing. So
your first task is to warn your clients that they're asking for
trouble unless they're prepared to back off on their deadlines or pay
an exorbitant amount to translators willing to give up their lives
for the next several weeks and do a crash translation. Even then,
you'll have some major quality issues if you don't plan for a
revision and quality control phase -- which is going to take
considerable time.
I'm a professional translator, but not an expert in the CAT
technology per se; I have some custom tools I've developed on my own
to support the kind of "boutique" translation I do (smaller jobs with
less repetition of standard phrases). Thus, I can only provide basic
advice from my own readings in this area and discussions with pros,
not a practitioner's hands-on expertise with CAT.
Given that you're asking these questions, I assume you aren't an
expert either, and that suggests that you'll need to be very careful
about your involvement in this: don't give advice you can't back up
from personal experience. My advice, particularly since your clients
are in a hurry, is to talk to an expert rather than attempting to
acquire that expertise yourself. I have no doubt that you could
acquire the necessary tools expertise if you're given enough time to
explore and master the technology, and if you know enough of the
second language to work with that language, but neither is the case.
So don't try.
<<4 What would be a way to judge the quality of translation produced
and would the Judges have to be paid extra?>>
Any credible professional translator includes a quality control step
in their work -- or if they're not capable of performing that step
themselves, they'll have the ethics to tell you this so you can find
a way to do that step yourself. But in both cases, the work is not
free: someone has to do the work, and that means that someone has to
pay for it. The cost may be a line item specified in a detailed
budget, or it may be buried in the per-word cost, but the cost will
always be there somewhere.
How to do it? Simplistically, you hire someone who is both expert in
the local language or dialect of the translation and capable of using
the product so they can ensure the docs make sense. They then
rigorously go through the documentation looking for errors and
difficult-to-comprehend text. Editors are often very good at this
because they're experts in their own language, and _technical_
editors are good tool users. But if the editor hasn't worked in
localization before, you'll have to clearly define the terms of what
you're expecting: not so much rewriting as fact checking and
polishing the text for clarity and consistency.
<<6 Would the best advise to the clients be that they forget Computer
Assisted Translation?>>
No, CAT is a great tool for getting the job done fast and well --
it's particularly good when time is an issue because each new
approved and verified phrase that enters the translation memory saves
time whenever you encounter that phrase again. But it's not a magic
bullet. You still have to build your translation memory by testing
each phrase before it enters that memory, and you have to find
someone capable of using the tool intelligently -- that is, using it
to support the human translator, not to replace them.
You also have to start planning now for the next version of the docs:
invest the time now on standardizing your terminology and editing the
source (English) documents rigorously for consistency and clarity,
and your next translation will make better use of the CAT you develop
in the current effort, will be less expensive, will go faster, and
will produce better results.
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