Five suggestions for successfully managing your translations

The translator is not the only actor in the success of a translation project. The translator plays an essential role and it is in your interest to find a good one. I am a good one, and I hope my website has convinced you of this. I take what I do very seriously and pride myself on the professionalism of my linguistic services.

But you too play—believe me—a very important role in the translation process. Why? Because you are the one who will determine in what conditions the translation will be carried out, and that can change everything.

Following are several actions that you can do to insure that your translation project is done in the best possible conditions.

• 1. Decide on translation at the beginning of the project and anticipate the time needed for it.

  • Very often the decision to translate is made belatedly. Translation on tight delays is a reality of my profession and assuring good client service means being able to respond when this happens.

    Nevertheless, waiting until the last minute is not a good tactic. Translation takes time, much more time than people think, especially in highly technical subjects such as biomedical sciences. At best, waiting until the last minute means a rush-job translation and quality will inevitably suffer; it's one thing if the document in question is a restaurant menu, it's a completely different thing when the subject is a new surgical technique. At worst, there will simply not be enough time to carry out the translation.

    Note as well that "urgent" translations are subject to additional charges.

    Anticipating translation time will give me the time needed to verify all technical and grammatical aspects of the target document, resulting in a better translation for less money.

• 2. Whenever possible, finalize the source document before sending it off for translation.

  • The project is behind schedule and the deadlines are threatening... The temptation is strong to start translating because, after all, "it's almost done". And you are not completely wrong. Let me reassure you right away that it is not an insurmountable obstacle to start a translation while the source-document is still being worked on, and this is probably preferable to receiving the document at the last minute.

    But given the choice, this too should be avoided. Modifying the source-document when it is already being translated can create coherency problems and provoke "domino errors", meaning that by correcting one thing a problem is created elsewhere. These difficulties are magnified by the fact that two documents need to be managed, the source-document and the target-document.

    Also, post-translation modification of a source-document means a retranslation must be done, and this is billed (this is not to be confused with your right to correction, please see the General Terms (in French)).

    Finalizing the source-document means being sure of your message. The translation will be all that much better.

• 3. Choose your translator carefully.

  • Although 3rd in this list, correctly choosing your translator is perhaps the most important step.

    First, for you, a health science professional, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of direct communication between you and your translator. I consider this point important enough to make it part of my engagement for quality. Responding to the particular linguistic issues in biomedical sciences demands total and reciprocal comprehension. To achieve this, unnecessary detours in communication must be avoided. If for whatever reason you choose not to call on me for your linguistic needs (most notably if you need a translation from English into French), I do encourage you to go to my "Useful links" page where you will find resources for finding another translator.

    Next, verify that your translator is specialized in your field. I have made the decision to specialize uniquely in biomedical sciences, which is already a vast subject. Many translators have several fields of specialty; this is not necessarily problematic, but be cautious when a translator claims to have four, five or more specialties. Everyone can of course manage their affairs as they see fit, but it seems difficult to me to be "specialized" in a large number of fields; you finish by not being truly specialized in any.

    As important as the preceding points: Make sure that your translator is translating into his or her native language. In my case, it is into English. A language is subtlety after subtlety and true mastery is only available to those who are "born into it". Be wary of people who claim to be "bilingual". True bilinguals are very rare; only those who were born and raised in a true and obligatory bilingual environment can claim this. I am not a bilingual, nor are the vast majority of translators. I speak fluent French, I understand French perfectly, I have been living in France since 1999, but I am not a French-English bilingual. Therefore, I translate only into English.

    Also, look for a translator with a University-level diploma in translation. I have two for my part: a graduate level degree in general technical translation and more importantly a post-graduate level degree in translation for health sciences. You need to know that the translation profession is in no way regulated and a diploma is a gage of seriousness. It is not the only gage of course; experience, for example, counts as well. But looking back on all I learned from my studies, I can assure you that those who have completed a University education in translation are better equipped for avoiding its numerous pitfalls.

    And finally, I encourage you to pick up your phone and call your translator. I'm here for you.

• 4. Whenever possible, send digital documents with editable text for translation.

  • This is almost no longer worth mentioning, we all work on computers now. However I would like to point out the advantages for you.

    By working on your digital documents I can overwrite. Overwriting has numerous advantages, starting with the respect of your page layout. It is also much more difficult to accidentally miss a section or paragraph; this is more difficult to control on a faxed document for example

    In addition to Word-type documents I can also translate from any current type of file: presentations (e.g. PowerPoint), spreadsheets (e.g. Excel), html, etc.

    Please send text-containing images with the text layers available, that is to say non-flattened (.tif or .psd extensions).

• 5. Be available for your translator.

  • As a professional translator, I make sure that I have all the knowledge and resources needed to carry out my work correctly. Nevertheless, sooner or later I am going to have a question that only the ultimate expert can answer. That would be you, the creator of the message being translated.

    This is never about asking you how I should translate something into English; that's my job. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is because I need clarification on an element of the text. Many things can provoke a "mark and ask", including of course highly technical information in the document. More frequently however, it is due to unclear wording and sometimes even semantically paradoxical or contradictory wording.

    The goal is to respect an old expression in translation, "understand first, then translate".

    Moreover, the translator's questions and comments will be very useful to you, because no one is going to read your text with as much meticulousness as your translator.

    Finally, be assured that you will not be flooded with questions. As I mentioned above, my professionalism and my specialization allow me to work autonomously almost all the time. If I should have questions I will send them to you grouped together and only after having attentively read the entirety of your document, because the answers are usually already there.

• Conclusion...

  • To learn more

    I suggest very highly reading the wonderfully clear and insightful "Le petit guide de l'acheteur de traductions", (in French only) available in .pdf format on the website of the Société Française des Traducteurs. You will surely find all the tips I have given here and much more. A definite 'must'.

    When you think about the time and effort you put into your communication projects, the steps that I suggest here are really not much. Their importance however should not be underestimated. After all, your English language communications are at least as important as those in French, and when you think that you will probably have more English readers than French, it is tempting to say that they are even more important. It would be a shame to not put everything in their favor. By putting these five suggestions into action you create the ideal conditions for your translations; they will be all the better for it!

    These five suggestions can be applied in fact to all of my services.