Understanding before translating!

Understanding before translating!

A good source text is a foundation of a good translation .. if the original text is poorly written or worse, machine translated or drafted by a non-native, understanding the source text becomes impossible – sometimes even reading a source text is tough…

We have already written a three-part blog series - Is your content translation-friendly part 1, Is your content translation-friendly part 2 and Is your content translation-friendly part 3 to discuss the many inconveniences of handling texts which have multiple issues like formatting, incorrect numbering, incomplete sentences, very long sentences, ambiguous details, inconsistent terminology, incorrectly structured document, etc.

However, in a recently completed large project, we realized that above all these, if the document is written by amateurs, the author’s native language influences the text quality and it is also very much possible these days to receive machine translated documents for further multilingual translation. So if it so happens that a Chinese document was machine translated into English and is then to be translated into other languages, the English in itself can be incomprehensible, and making sense of it is a challenge ☹.

Here are a few examples:

• It cant be operated When buttons are inflexible actuated;
• When the down gradient of the drainpipe can't be ensured, after upright lifting, the drainpipe is in the down slope

We have to get back to the client for explanation of such funny sentences and it becomes another task to keep track of all such communication and to finalize a decently correct document that can then be translated into multiple languages. If however the client can’t help you due to unavailability or lack of understanding on their part, much more time has to be spent on research and consulting with experts before such documents can be translated.