Maintaining consistency and precision while adhering to tight timelines is a common hurdle of high-volume translation projects. Translation Guidelines introduce an adept solution designed to economize on time and deliver refined outcomes for your translation endeavors. Before embarking on your translation journey, we invite you to join Thao & Co. in exploring the significance of Translation Guides and the rationale behind their indispensability.
It goes without saying that you are familiar with leaflets or manuals that come with any purchase. These materials are informative resources for enterprises and consumers, conveying product details and offering a comprehensive user guide.
In parallel, Translation Guidelines assume a role of comparable significance as valuable documents facilitating translators’ more profound comprehension of the business’ brand essence and its range of products and specific translation instructions pertinent to each project. To illustrate, while user manuals cater to end consumers, Translation Guides are tailored for translators and proofreaders, serving as a compass for their linguistic endeavors.
The development of Translation Guidelines stands as an essential pre-translation service commonly employed in diverse translation projects, including:
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Furthermore, the pivotal significance of Translation Guidelines resonates within projects targeting the translation of marketing materials as enterprises venture into foreign markets. A common thread among these translation initiatives lies in their medium-to-large scale, demanding considerable proficiency in translation.
Within every domain lies a distinct reservoir of knowledge while each business exudes its singular identity. Navigating a translation project that involves numerous translators and specialists to ensure a high degree of consistency or alignment with the brand’s distinct character can pose significant challenges.
This is where a set of Translation Guidelines steps in — a potent tool for establishing cohesive benchmarks that bestow significant benefits upon businesses:
For domains with an abundance of specialized terminologies requiring accuracy — such as medicine, construction, mechanics, and the like, the preliminary establishment of standardized translations becomes an indispensable prerequisite. Translation Guidelines furnish a comprehensive glossary underpinning maximum precision across each translation.
Consistency is a cornerstone of effective branding, primarily when businesses aim to amplify brand recognition in new markets. Translation Guidelines will ensure that all translations are consistent with the company’s brand identity, including terminology, tone of voice, and style. These benchmarks help to guarantee that translations are compatible with the company’s brand image and style, preventing disjointed or incongruent translations that could damage the brand.
By providing translators with established conventions and meticulous glossaries, we can significantly reduce the time-consuming tasks of reviewing and editing. Implementing translation guidelines accelerates translation speeds and improves accuracy and consistency. This, in turn, optimizes work efficiency and significantly shortens the overall project timeline.
Translation Guidelines confer immediate benefits to the translation project and sustained advantages for enterprises. These guidelines have been meticulously developed through extensive brand analysis and comprehensive research into the language and culture of the target market. As a result, after the translation project, the enterprise possesses a well-defined set of guidelines and a versatile dictionary to facilitate the execution of international business strategies.
For future translations into another language, the existing Translation Guidelines stand as a valuable point of reference, constructing a solid framework that amplifies the efficiency and speed of the translation process.
Given the aforementioned exceptional advantages, you might be interested in the constituents of the Translation Guidelines. Each translation agency may have their own approach to developing Translation Guidelines. A set of professional Translation Guidelines, as exemplified by Thao & Co., has the following components:
This segment offers a comprehensive, step-by-step workflow tailored to the translators, considering the project’s requirements and mutual agreement on the client’s delivery timelines. As a tech-enabled translation agency, Thao & Co. has developed a proprietary translation platform to streamline our workflow and power complete security for highly confidential projects.
With our extensive experience in translation and localization, we can collaborate effectively on a wide range of translation platforms, including SmartCAT, Crowdin, MemoQ, Phrase, and more. If you need your translation to be performed on any specific platform, don’t hesitate to let us know. Thao & Co. will be glad to accomodate all your translation needs!
Within the section on translation instructions, labeled as Read First, there will be a detailed exploration of several key aspects: the target audience, the appropriate writing style, and whether the translation needs to be SEO-enhanced or more creatively adapted. These essential details provide translators with a deep understanding of the project’s purpose and business objectives. Subsequently, the completed translation attains remarkable precision while seamlessly aligning with the brand’s identity.
Do-not-translate is a list that prioritizes personal designations, such as brand names, product labels, features, etc., that businesses prefer to retain in their original language. This list may also encompass terms where the target language commonly borrows from the source language. As an illustration, Vietnamese tend to use the English word App more than the Vietnamese equivalent “ứng dụng.”
A glossary is a meticulous collection of specialized terms or keywords linked to brand attributes. The entries in this list are available in both the source and the target language, all of which are carefully selected and precisely reflect the brand’s unique style. If the client requires an SEO Keyword Glossary, this glossary will provide additional research tailored to the most popular search engine in the target market.
Beyond the four main sections mentioned earlier, additional considerations may be included based on project specifics. For instance, a website translation may demand more pronounced SEO imperatives, while a video subtitle translation project or a movie subtitle translation might necessitate detailed attention to character count per line and reading speed.
Before starting a translation project, the Project Manager and Language Lead will work closely with the client to develop comprehensive Translation Guidelines that incorporate the above elements per their needs.
Once you have decided to request a set of Translation Guidelines for your translation project, the translation agency will typically engage with your content and implement any provided guidance within the translation process. At Thao & Co., the protocol for constructing customized Translation Guidelines dedicated to your project entails the following steps:
1. Consultation and request processing: The Project Manager and Language Lead engage in a strategic consultation phase, carefully gathering relevant information about the content to be translated and a comprehensive roadmap aligning with the project’s goals.
2. Target Market Research: Our focus lies in researching the target customers extensively, delving into their language, preferences, behaviors, and cultural nuances. As a result, translation instructions are carefully developed to ensure that the translation resonates with the intended customers and is culturally appropriate for the local context.
For businesses seeking elevated translation quality, we offer supplementary services provided by field experts. These services encompass:
3. Glossary compilation: Our Language Lead meticulously curates a refined glossary that seamlessly aligns with the brand’s core identity. These terms must be used consistently to establish uniformity across the text.
4. Translation Guidelines Finalization: We communicate with the client to finalize the Translation Guidelines. Before starting the translation process, the completed Translation Guidelines will be provided to the translators to ensure the most precise translation.
5. Translation and Proofreading: Translators start working on the project, frequently consulting the provided Translation Guidelines. During the translation process, if novel and significant keywords or terms come to the fore, translators recommend their inclusion to the Language Lead, contributing to refining the Translation Guidelines. Our cutting-edge ChatBoxⒸ feature facilitates seamless interaction between the translation team and the client throughout the translation process to ensure meticulous alignment with the business’s specific requirements, culminating in a final output of unparalleled quality.
6. Final Delivery: Beyond the delivery of the final product, we further provide a dedicated project dictionary for easy reference to specific terms and concepts. Additionally, your personalized dashboard account will remain active, ready for use in future collaborations. For ongoing monthly projects, after each file is completed, the Language Lead reviews all translations to ensure they are aligned with the client’s requirements and updates the glossary and guidelines as proposed by the translators where appropriate.
Your exclusive dashboard provides a real-time view of the entire translation process, including any updates to the Translation Guidelines. This proprietary platform, pioneered by Thao & Co., is a comprehensive repository of information, such as expert profiles, project status, and more, to facilitate clients with easy tracking progress and direct communication with our expert linguists.
The meticulous development of Translation Guidelines is paramount in maintaining the consistency and precision of your translation endeavor. Unfortunately, this particular service has not garnered the deserved attention it warrants. When selecting a translation partner, it is prudent to consider whether the company provides adept Translation Guidelines based on a clear and efficient methodology.
Thao & Co. is committed to professionalism and excellence; we have an organized framework to provide our clients with a wide range of invaluable services, delivering the highest level of satisfaction. Thao & Co.’s Translation Guidelines development service is one of the most popular offerings thanks to its remarkable utility. The Project Manager and Language Lead are carefully selected based on their expertise in the field relevant to the project to ensure that the Translation Guidelines are optimized for translation efficiency and quality.
Get a comprehensive consultation on Thao & Co.’s translation services today, and visit our Get a Quote page to connect with us!
