Translators - The Tech Writer's Best Friend/Worst Enemy

"Say, Jean, the translators found some problems with the original English documentation your team wrote. Do you want me to send you the corrections?"

"Sure, John. Do you want me to send you a nice cartridge of mustard gas?"

I never find that writers embrace the feedback from translators. It's not that the translators go out of their way to find errors; mostly it's that they don't understand the term/phrase/sentence/paragraph and cannot therefore translate it. This is the fundamental test of documentation usability - are you conveying your idea to the reader? - and most writers get grumpy when they don't pass it with flying colors.

It's also not the case that translators get snooty about the errors they find. In fact it's I, not the translators, who add a thin veneer of snootiness to the comments I send to the writers.

• Why are all of these Copy(1) and Copy(2) files in the RoboHelp project? Do we need them? Should we translate them?
• The FrameMaker files you gave us don't match the PDF you gave us. Which one is correct? (To their credit, most translators won't take for granted that the one with the later date stamp is the definitive source.)
• This training manual is for version 5.3. The last version of the software that we translated was 5.1. What has changed in the software? Do we need to translate the delta first, in order to translate the manual properly?
• We found 136 pages in the online help file with no content in them. Are they meant to be that way, or did something go wrong in the extraction process?
  

Writers don't often like to hear such feedback, but, if it's implemented, nobody can deny that it makes the books better.