Getting Quality Output

Project Cost and Project Success Depend on the Words!
Getting the right words to make what you are translating achieve the objective of the original content is where translation quality matters. This has significant impact in two areas; the project cost and the project's success. Cost meaning that mistakes and inconsistencies at this step create extra costly revision cycles. In terms of success, projects where the translated content does not match the vernacular of the destination audience means that the objective of the messaging can be lost on that audience. For example, a user manual that confuses a user or is inaccurate, or a marketing piece that offends potential buyers or conveys the wrong message.

What you are communicating has to make sense to the intended audience!
When the message is not clear or is offensive to the target audience it affects sales and your corporate image. A language service provider that understands localization and internationalization issues, is able to reflect the perspective of the audience's region.   Localization can extend to dialects and cultural factors.  Content written for broad global audiences requires standards in expressions to survive the translation in order for that content to mean exactly the same thing regardless of the audience that is reading it. To be successful in this area, a translator must truly understand both the language and culture of the audience they are writing for.

Your content needs to make sense so people will use it!
In large content communication projects, a company could be translating the source content into multiple languages.  In addition, the volume of content can be quite large with multiple sections, multiple source technical writers and multiple translators.  All of these different writers and translators need to be consistent in their translation outputs.  Terms, expressions, and key descriptions need to be consistent in both the source and translated content.  This is where project management can be incredibly valuable in reducing the number of revisions required to arrive at a final output.  It also means that a decision can be made about a translation and then enforced easily across the whole project.

How ACCU solves this problem:

• Glossary
By creating a glossary of terms the original translation can be decided at the senior level and then enforced across every level of the project.
• Memories
Translation memories are a great way to reduce the future costs of projects.  Translation memories allow sentences and phrases to be consistently translated within projects and across multiple projects of one customer.  The more translations can depend on past translations the greater the reduction in the work of fresh translations in a new project.
• Style Guide
The style guide speaks to ideas like tone and feel.  What is the impression that the customer wants to achieve with the intended audience of the content?