Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?

Subject: Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?
From: Deborah Hemstreet <dvora -at- tech-challenged -dot- com>
To: Dan Goldstein <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:03:28 -0400

Hi Dan,

I have heard of companies that use this methodology. It is termed
"reverse translation". Some companies really like this method. I
personally think it is not very useful. There is a lot of discussion as
to whether or not this is a good method to use. For spot-checking
something, as a sample from a group of translations, it MIGHT be good.
The problem is, obviously, that you have a different person handling
each language. When you are dealing with 24 languages at once, this
spot-check can be costly. However, it can work, if you take out one or
two pages of each document, and reverse translate that part.

The assumption is that if this small sample is good, the entire document
will be good.

You might want to check translation discussion groups on this issue. I
used to be involved with one a few years back, but I no longer have the
link. Still, this is one method that, while controversial, is
surprisingly used quite often.

Food for thought....

Deborah
http://www.tech-challenged.com

Dan Goldstein wrote:
> Do you have an sample of technical documentation that was translated by
> this method? It sounds expensive, time-consuming, and (as Peter pointed
> out) not even that accurate.
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dossy Shiobara
>> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 4:39 PM
>> To: Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare, consultant)
>> Cc: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>> Subject: Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?
>>
>> Hire someone else to complete the round-trip of the
>> translation: provide them the translated text, and ask them
>> to translate it into the original language.
>>
>> In other words, you need to have two separate translators.
>> You give the first translator the source material and ask
>> them to translate from language X to Y. You give the second
>> translator the output from the first translator, but ask them
>> to translate from Y to X.
>>
>> If the output of the second translator is reasonably close to
>> the original source material, then it's probably reasonable
>> to assume that the translation was faithful.
>>
>>
>
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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Follow-Ups:

References:
How do you ensure the quality of translations?: From: Boudreaux, Madelyn (GE Healthcare, consultant)
Re: How do you ensure the quality of translations?: From: Dossy Shiobara
RE: How do you ensure the quality of translations?: From: Dan Goldstein

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