Time is one of the most precious assets a translator has. The professional translator knows what time means in his daily trade at the wordsmith workshop. The translator is in fact always fighting time as he/she knows that the deadline must be met at any cost. Time is one of the key factors either for many clients choosing their translators or for translation agencies assigning projects.
Translation agencies often have to coordinate projects dealing with different target languages which will certainly mean talking with language professionals in different time-zones. Also, translation is repeatedly not one of the first priorities to be addressed while preparing an internationalization strategy, therefore translation and proofreading of marketing materials and technical data are often relegated to the last stages of the project.
So what can be done in order to improve the speed of premium-quality translations? The best way to gain time for the translation process itself is the combination of a number of factors, which once properly concatenated will allow the trained professional translator to reap the fruits of his/her training, work and intellectual assets.
Step #1 :: Computer-Assisted Translation or Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools have been around for roughly a quarter of a century (TRADOS company was created in 1984). Despite the fact that major developments in related computer hardware and software came after the mid-1990’s, it doesn’t mean most professional translators are taking all the benefits from the technology. Nowadays, the advantages of such an investment are incommensurable as the time factor becomes a pre-requisite for most contracts. The state-of-the-art of most CAT tools nowadays allows time savings due to their extensive support to the translation process with tools, such as, translation memories, multilingual corpora, text alignment methods, and terminology management systems.
Step #2 :: ...
(Continues on next post...)
Translation agencies often have to coordinate projects dealing with different target languages which will certainly mean talking with language professionals in different time-zones. Also, translation is repeatedly not one of the first priorities to be addressed while preparing an internationalization strategy, therefore translation and proofreading of marketing materials and technical data are often relegated to the last stages of the project.
So what can be done in order to improve the speed of premium-quality translations? The best way to gain time for the translation process itself is the combination of a number of factors, which once properly concatenated will allow the trained professional translator to reap the fruits of his/her training, work and intellectual assets.
Step #1 :: Computer-Assisted Translation or Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools have been around for roughly a quarter of a century (TRADOS company was created in 1984). Despite the fact that major developments in related computer hardware and software came after the mid-1990’s, it doesn’t mean most professional translators are taking all the benefits from the technology. Nowadays, the advantages of such an investment are incommensurable as the time factor becomes a pre-requisite for most contracts. The state-of-the-art of most CAT tools nowadays allows time savings due to their extensive support to the translation process with tools, such as, translation memories, multilingual corpora, text alignment methods, and terminology management systems.
Step #2 :: ...
(Continues on next post...)
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