From patchwork approach to team management
By their very nature, translation projects involve multiple people, from varying backgrounds and cultures, who must combine all of their efforts towards a common goal.
Everything starts with the content authors, whose skills and willingness to write with translation in mind will influence the cost and turnaround time of a translation project.
Ideally, authors of promotional materials will write elegantly, but unambiguously, avoiding humorous references to local sporting events or television series which an audience from another country, language and culture would not appreciate.
Technical communicators, meanwhile, should put clarity first, using shorter sentences, in active mode, and avoiding endophoric expressions, inspired by standards such as SAE J2450.
Enter the translators: Cogen is able to draw on a vast team of professionally trained, native speakers to find those most suited to a given task. From this extensive resource pool, we will select those with specific experience of your market sector and subject matter.
Translator profiling will be done by our Language Resource team in collaboration with you, the customer. You will be shown a sample translation, by three different translators, of a part of a document you have chosen. This will enable you, or your in-country reviewers, to select the best translators (one main and one backup per language) for the job.
This exercice can also include translators suggested by you: simply ask to assign these as translators, without further profiling.
Once translators have been selected, they will form your dedicated team. The Project Management tool will by default assign all of your projects to them, reminding project coordinators to alert you if circumstances or time constraints require deviation from that rule.
Your designated translators will be encouraged repeatedly to contact, even to visit your in-country reviewers in the event of the slightest hesitation about the source content or terminology. They will also receive, at the end of each project, an analysis file which highlights the edits that your reviewers have applied to their original translation.
For the entire duration of a project, the translators will have online access, through Cogen's language asset management tools, to your translation memory, enabling them to locate previous translations. The Terminology Management tool will flag up specialist terminology, designating how this should be treated or translated.
From day 1 of our engagement, your in-country reviewers (or reviewers appointed by Cogen) will be asked to rate our translations based on style, accuracy, and terminology. The Language Resource team logs these ratings, as well as the percentage of edits, and will take immediate action whenever a pre-set threshold is reached.
The project coordinator ensures that each of these roles is carried out effectively and efficiently, and in harmony, having developed a keen sense of your requirements, specifications and guidelines, and documented these in the Project Management system. Throughout the project, the project coordinator will ensure that all translators, reviewers and desktop publishers adhere to these criteria.
Following six months of in-depth training, the project coordinator will know how to analyze your projects effecively upfront, and how to anticipate and iron out issues.