How To Prepare For Document Translation

It is also the client’s (your) responsibility to make sure that your document will be translated with nothing less than impeccable output. So before you go around hitting the counters of document translation agencies or sending inquiries, here are a few things you should do to ensure that the translation job’s output will be to your best interests.

The first and most important step, of course, is making sure your document’s text is tight and near-flawless. Avoid being wordy or verbose, as it can only make life harder for the translator. Sure, you are paying the agency for this document translation job, and you cannot care whether or not they might have a hard time translating your document, right? Wrong.

Do not make it harder than it needs to be. Brevity and clarity, as always, is king. Moreover, most document translators charge on a per word basis, so the tighter your text is, the less it would cost you. So if you can, edit your document as thoroughly as possible—cut off the dead wood, tighten it in the right places.

Furthermore, make sure that your document is as cleanly typed as possible. If it is a muddled faxed copy, have it retyped if you can. Submitting muddled or “smeary” text for a document translation service would make it vulnerable to translation errors, or at least delay the completion of the job as the agency might encounter some ambiguity and might want to wait for your confirmation. For that same reason, have plenty of white space in your document to make the whole thing easy on the eyes and to allow room for adjustment. Do not bunch up the words in eight-point Arial Narrow, for instance.

Another important aspect of preparing your document for translation is to keep the slang or idiomatic expressions to a bare minimum. If you can totally avoid using any slang, the better. Slang is one of the most difficult things to handle when translating documents because, more often than not, there is no equivalent linguistic structure in the target language. And besides, why use slang at all when you can just say it straight to the point?

All the above-mentioned tips are mostly good only for documents that are not yet laid out on a page. If you have a magazine article that is already laid out (complete with photos) for translation, then the difficulty level of translating it goes up a notch.

Languages are not exactly equal in the number of words or characters. For example, the text of a document translation into German usually has 30 percent more characters than its original English text. So if the target language happens to be 30 percent longer, and the lay-out happens to be already “pushed to the margins,” then the challenge of producing a proper document translation output that fits the original layout can be quite a challenge to hurdle. This is a common occurrence in international magazines produced in different languages.

By: clacandazo

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Charlene Lacandazo works for Rosetta Translation, a leading translation agency in London, UK and Shanghai, China. Rosetta Translation specialises in all types of document translation, including business and legal translation services worldwide.