Translation Technology and Workflow Procedures in Technical Documentation Management
3. Case study: Integrated Language Services (ILS)
Integrated Language Services (ILS) is a linguistics department in a large printing company. Located near Antwerp in Belgium ILS was founded in 1999 to meet the growing demand of Blondé’s customers for high quality content and increased consistency within multilingual documents. The staff at ILS are dealing with all language-related issues including copywriting, translation, Translation Memories and terminology management, remodelling and fine-tuning of language workflows in Pan-European communication projects. It may seem obvious that many printed publications need translation. However, language and text tend to be treated in a step-motherly way in a printing company, while the focus is normally placed on the quality of the materials used in the printing process, such as paper, ink, colour, etc. One has to safeguard the quality of the language used in the texts and to improve service to the customers.
The problems involved comprise different aspects:
• quality of the source text;
• updating of the content;
• quality of catalogues:
content validation and control;
localisation issues (different products and specifications for different markets);
quick updating of technical data;
time to market;
• quality of technical manuals;
• quality of owner manuals;
• quality of commercial publications.
In addition to these aspects that involve the source text, translation issues arise:
• quality of the target text;
• localisation for different markets;
• content validation.
In order to tackle these problems, a ‘one source, many outputs’ solution would be ideal. However, it has proven to be very difficult to reach this type of solution with customers one is not that familiar with, or where the mother company is very far away, as in this case for ILS, where most customers are Asian companies, who assign the
entire process of producing and printing manuals for the European market (sometimes up to 28 languages) to one company.
The main tasks of ILS can therefore be analysed as follows:
• coordination and streamlining of the translation process;
• creation, hosting and updating of the Translation Memories and terminology databases, online or offline, Web or desktop, to ensure consistent translations throughout various publications as well as the use of validated in-house customer-specific terminology;
• dealing with all editing, copywriting and localisation issues;
• content creation and delivery for multilingual websites, in cooperation with multimedia and knowledge departments;
• source text control and management.
3.1. Workflow procedures
The workflow procedures are designed in close cooperation with the customers, but the basic structure of the approach is as follows:
• Pre-study of existing documentation, including:
Style briefing to translators and reference material evaluated by the customer.
Terminology study of source texts and mapping of inconsistencies.
• Implementation of MAHT.
• Evaluation by the customer and internal evaluation.
• Continue full project execution.
• Follow up and periodic evaluation.
Many Asian Customers turn to this printing office to take care of all their publishing needs for the European market. A European market that is very confusing to them, due to the large amount of cultures and languages, and this involves quite some difficult localisation techniques.
The Asian source texts show a number of problems:
• Very often they are already translated in a “draft” version: Japenglese.
• They are very often available in unknown data formats only, incompatible to most Translation Memories and file formats for printing.
• The content of the text still needs adaptation to the European market.
In some cases, the whole source text needs revision in order to be suitable for translation. It is very hard to convince the company of this type of additional tasks, involving delays and more costs.
The text is not only often grammatically and semantically inconsistent or simply incorrect, but frequently the author is a person working in the technical staff, who may be sensitive about technical elements, but insensitive to market and customer orientation.
In addition, rewritten source texts need to be accompanied by comprehensive local market guidelines when sent out to translators. Even with technical information such as owner manuals, there is always the need for some level of localisation. For example, technical specifications may differ from one country to another, and even the market orientation of products may differ from one country to another.
Another complication is text expansion. There may not be enough space reserved in the Asian master document for expansion into European languages. This forces one to rebuild the master template and layout and to adapt it for the European market.
3.2. Knowledge management
Knowledge management is the key term covering this evolution. Knowledge exists on the levels of:
• textual info;
• graphical info;
• corporate identity info.
These types of information need to be reused in various output formats, including CD-ROMs, websites, media-neutral databases, printed matter, etc. It goes without saying that implementing knowledge management requires serious investment, training, and internal restructuring. However, this investment will be returned on a mid-term basis.
This is done not only by a reduction in time to market, but also in a highly differentiated output: from printed documents over websites to CD-ROMS etc.
Additional advantages of knowledge management include:
• improved consistency;
• reduction of budget strains resulting from communication errors;
• process streamlining;
• customer binding;
• production cycle cutback;
• corporate identity enhancement;
• market positioning;
• media-neutral storage, allowing for future re-use, e.g. using Translation Memories.
While it may be hard to convince a customer at first of the benefits of knowledge management, it is even harder to convince customers of the necessity of terminology management and MAHT.
As an adequate budget is nearly always absent, and the benefits are not immediately visible, ‘selling’ Translation Memory and terminology database solutions is not always easy. Customers are primarily interested in cutting back translation costs, and are hesitant to invest in long-term solutions. In addition, not all documents are suitable for processing with translation software and care should be taken when offering this service to a customer.
4. Conclusion
In this paper we tried to highlight some of the procedures in technical document creation and translation that may improve the whole process:
• source text control;
• terminology management;
• translation management;
• content management;
• critical analysis of the needs of the user;
• workflow management.
A number of interesting industrial cases prove that this method of handling technical documentation may lead to a more successful process management and finally to a better output.