Instructions to in-country reviewers

"The best translation of any sentence is the one that the customer likes the best." -Me

Did you learn this the hard way, as I did? Back in the old days, I would marshal the translators' dictionaries and sources against the dictionaries and sources of my in-country reviewers to prove a point. Ultimately, of course, that never paid off, and I came to realize that regardless of who had which references, it's the in-country reviewer who should generally prevail, for a couple of reasons:

• The reviewer, not the translator, has to live with the translation and can eventually be convinced that it's important work.
• The reviewer, assuming I've selected him/her properly, is as close as I can get to the consumer of the translation (the real customer), and whether a linguist or not, best understands the terminology that will make sense to that consumer.
• Even when the task of review falls to a completely mismatched person, like a salesperson reviewing a user manual, there is still more value in having him/her review it than in sending it to another translator. I generally get less feedback from a non-technical reviewer, but it's a better sign-off.

Sometimes, though, the in-country reviewers really are linguists (or want to be), and they introduce considerable changes in the course of their review. It's important to give them guidelines for the reviews they perform so that they understand what we want and don't want from them. Among those guidelines:

• First and foremost, look for areas in which the translators have completely missed the point of the source text. Customers will overlook small, stylistic differences between source and translation, but they will become angry if the translated content is just plain wrong.
• If the source text is wrong (e.g., incorrect procedure or misstated information), take it up with the writer of the source text. Our job is to translate the source, not define it. If you make your suggestions in English, we can forward them to the writers, but we cannot in good conscience put out a translated document that does not match the source.
• Be specific about the changes you propose. In reviewing a word processing document, enable change tracking so that we can easily find your modifications. In a PDF, annotate the document with your comments. For HTML pages, use a spreadsheet or table-formatted list. The easier it is to identify your changes, the easier it is to implement them correctly.
• While you're welcome to review every sentence on every page, we don't expect you to do so. You'll know after a few paragraphs whether the translation is atrocious, and that's the most important thing we want to establish.
• We'll incorporate as many of your changes as possible. Some of them may have to wait for the next version of the product.
  
• In the case of long documents and detailed review, rate your comments by severity so that we can address the most urgent ones first.
  
• In order for us to keep to our schedule and deliver the finished product so that you can begin selling it, we need your comments back by [give a specific, reasonable deadline].

Frankly, the last point is the most important. Without a deadline, reviewers will often procrastinate the work mercilessly, and you'll end up waiting a long time only to get nothing.