If it isn't broken...break it!
What's the most effective way to bump up your translation costs unnecessarily?
Probably by localizing something that nobody will ever want in a foreign language, of course. But nobody would ever approve an expense like that, so it wouldn't have the opportunity to affect your translation costs.
There's a much sneakier, more pernicious way of wasting translation money: Tinkering with the original text (for example, English).
Suppose you localized your product or documentation from 2002 through 2007. You'd have five years' worth of translation memory (TM) economies and glossary entries going for you, with thousands of exactly matched words that incurred no translation cost from one version to the next. Then suppose that someone decided in 2008 to go in and "clean up" the original English text to make it more "readable" or "user-friendly."
What do you think would happen the next time you handed off this content for TM analysis? Suddenly, non-matches would pop up where exact matches used to be. Among the causes:
Note that re-organizing content should not cost you additional translation money; as long as the sentence is the same (i.e., an exact match), it doesn't matter where it's located in the product.
So, are you better off leaving errors and other undesirables in your original-language content? No. It would be a mistake to let concern for translation cost impede your product improvement effort, like having the tail wag the dog. Still, to the extent you can control it, you should try to avoid purely stylistic changes that make no difference in how your customers use your product. A good editor can make a hundred such changes per hour, not realizing the ramifications on translation costs.
If you learned something from this post, you might like to read Improved Docs through Localization or Getting the Writers to Care about Localized Documents.
Probably by localizing something that nobody will ever want in a foreign language, of course. But nobody would ever approve an expense like that, so it wouldn't have the opportunity to affect your translation costs.
There's a much sneakier, more pernicious way of wasting translation money: Tinkering with the original text (for example, English).
Suppose you localized your product or documentation from 2002 through 2007. You'd have five years' worth of translation memory (TM) economies and glossary entries going for you, with thousands of exactly matched words that incurred no translation cost from one version to the next. Then suppose that someone decided in 2008 to go in and "clean up" the original English text to make it more "readable" or "user-friendly."
What do you think would happen the next time you handed off this content for TM analysis? Suddenly, non-matches would pop up where exact matches used to be. Among the causes:
- Combining short sentences together
- Breaking long sentences apart
- Making stylistic changes to common terms (e.g., changing "phone" to "telephone" or "handset")
- Standardizing disparate terms (e.g., selecting one of "Proceed as follows," "Perform the following steps," "Following is the required procedure" and propagating throughout the documentation)
- Typographical or grammatical corrections
Note that re-organizing content should not cost you additional translation money; as long as the sentence is the same (i.e., an exact match), it doesn't matter where it's located in the product.
So, are you better off leaving errors and other undesirables in your original-language content? No. It would be a mistake to let concern for translation cost impede your product improvement effort, like having the tail wag the dog. Still, to the extent you can control it, you should try to avoid purely stylistic changes that make no difference in how your customers use your product. A good editor can make a hundred such changes per hour, not realizing the ramifications on translation costs.
If you learned something from this post, you might like to read Improved Docs through Localization or Getting the Writers to Care about Localized Documents.
Labels: documentation localization, effect of localization, technical writers, translators, writing for localization
posted by John White, Localization Guy at
16:50
2 Comments:
Well said, John.
Of course, the reverse is also true: What is a sure-fire way to drive up translation cost in your documentation? Attempting to make it "more readable" or "more explicit" by driving up the volume of verbiage you write, not shortening your sentences, etc. ....
By
Christian Taube, at 23:56
Yes, Christian. It's just additional proof of the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished.
By
John White, Localization Guy, at 13:42
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