Getting the Writers to Care about Localized Documents

Do your technical writers go through the localized documents before handing them off to production?

I thought not.

It is, of course, just one more thing on a writer's already crowded list of things to do. Add to that the appeal for the writer of going through a book in a language of which s/he has probably no notion, and you have a recipe for can't/won't/don't want to.

You can go through it yourself, localization manager that you are, and you'll probably find a few things wrong. But the writers are looking for very different things, and they have a talent for spotting them immediately. If you can get your writers around the corner on the inconvenience of the exercise, you'll find that they add real value. The movement into and out of translation software can break things in a large document, and who better to detect such things - even with no more than a cursory overview - than the people who wrote the book in the first place?

I've seen writers go through translated versions of their documents and find:

• unexplained typeface changes
• broken or dead hyperlinks
• missing callouts
• untranslated text
• incorrect document part numbers
• corrupted graphics
  

The real showstopper, though, occurs at the end of a two-month translation cycle for a 300-page manual, when the writer spends ten minutes going through the book, then sends you e-mail that reads, "Nice job on the Chinese manual, but you got the wrong version translated."

Maybe not the optimal time to find this out, but once again: Who besides the writer would have caught this?