Procedure of assuring translation quality

Acquiring perfection is impossible in translation, so it becomes necessary for translation service providers to assure the translation quality to be as best as it can get. Translation is something that won’t ever receive a nod of 100%, you are most likely to receive objections and complain about the words used or phrasing or grammar of the translation because of personal priorities and preferences and different backgrounds.

If you are looking for one of the simplest procedure to maintain the quality you should follow the given three steps for each and every single translation project whether it is large or small:

Step one – Carrying out translation job

• The job shall be assigned to the most suitable person who can handle the translation quality.
• He must be a native speaker of target language and must be aware of the style, tone and grammar of source and target languages.
• Translation job shall be carried out in such a manner that it shall sound as the content has directly been written and not translated from any other language. In short, target content shall sound natural rather than artificial.
• Translation shall be in accordance with the end users’ needs and priorities as described by the client.
• A big translation project shall not be assigned to a newbie because fresh professionals lack concentration and the quality deteriorates as the work progresses.

Step two – Editing the work

• The translated content shall be thoroughly checked by another competitive and eligible translator.
• This translator shall not have any connection with his predecessor to ensure the impartiality and objectivity.
• He shall check the translated content regarding spellings, grammar, style, context and tone of the source document.
• HE MUST ENSURE THAT TRANSLATION IS A MIRROR IMAGE. IT MEANS THAT TARGET CONTENT CONVEYS THE SAME SENSE AS IS CONVEYED BY THE SOURCE CONTENT.
• He shall point out major mistakes and take notes about the weaknesses and shall notify the previous translator about these mistakes so as to avoid them in future.

Step 3 – Internal Monitoring and Checks

• Check the formatting of the target document that it is in accordance with the client’s needs or if there are no distinctive instruction as to the formatting then formatting shall be the mirror image of source document.
• Look for any typos, spelling mistakes, missing content, consistency of translation and images and graphs that they are perfectly well handled.

By applying these steps, you will be able to provide better and accurate translation services.

About Author:

Muawiyah Haider is an expert article writer, works for professional Arabic translation agency OLS.  For more information please visit our website: Professional translation.

Copyright: Any one can republish this article provided that the text, active links, author name, and this notice remain intact.

Few things for beginners to remember while translating

Translation is considered as an easy job whereas fact is it is as difficult as writing a new piece of paper, or sometime it becomes harder than this. You have not only to exactly express the same meaning which the author intended to do but also have to maintain his style so that reader wouldn’t find weirdness in the writing.  How to keep up balance between these two complementary things? Following are few tips which will help you overcome this problem.

Biggest mistake which most people do in translation is they try to translate by putting words precisely as it is written in dictionary. This is ridiculous. Never try to do this. Every language has his own grammatical structures, his own way of describing things. What you have to do is to just put those meanings in the target language. For example: in English we say “May I beg your pardon?” You will definitely not translate it as:کیا میں آپ کی معافی مانگ سکتا ہوں؟ Language is an essential part of culture; so you have to know the culture of both source and target languages.

Word to word translation can not only be bad but  also sometime gives contrary meaning .So you must be extra careful while doing translation, whether you are conveying the same meaning? It is very important that you carefully read once, twice or even thrice so that you fully understand the text. In literary or academic writings it becomes more important because author here uses more connotations. Its not important that you try to find alternate word in target language for every word. You can use two, three or a whole sentence, if necessary, to pass on those meanings instead of one word.

Another thing to remember is terms such as not present in target language, for example computer, mobile etc. You will come across this problem more often doing a technical translation. The best thing you can do is to “transliterate” them. Transliteration means to write that same word in target language. For example; Computer-کمپیوٹر (I will come up with a detailed article about transliteration later) National Language Authority Islamabad has tried to translate these kind of terms in their dictionary but for reader it becomes more difficult to understand those words. For example; Thermometer is translated as “آلہ پیمائش حرارت “. Point here is that thermometer is so widely used in our society that everyone knows what thermometer is; so by writing “آلہ پیمائش حرارت  “you are making it more difficult to understand. Keep these things in your mind, hopefully you will be able to become a good translator.

About Author:

Muawiyah Haider is an expert article writer, works for professional translation services agency OLS.  For more information please visit our website: Professional translation.

Copyright: Any one can republish this article provided that the text, active links, author name, and this notice remain intact.