Virtual Team Project – Week 8
No more experiments this week. The graphics designer created the French graphics while the translation team finalised the translation, then I reviewed the translation against the source English instructions.
The translation required very few edits, mostly small consistency edits in terminology and syntax, which are expected when two or more people collaborate on a translation. Even in a one-person translation team, typos and other issues are likely, especially after spending a long period of time on a project. Four weeks ago, I talked about how editing gets less efficient with each round of reviews. And even advanced spelling and grammar checker software will not spot some issues.
During my review, I noticed some localisations choices, but I also noticed small issues in the English that the French translators did not reproduce. For example, in one instance, the glossary definition of a term was inserted with the bookmarked term within the instructions. This must have happened after during the last review before I created the PDF because this insert is too obviously out of place to be missed during a review. And the French team did not reproduce this issue. Similarly, the bold formatting on some UI terms was missing in some English terms, but not in the French UI terms. Great for the translation, but we did ask the translators several times to inform us of such issues so that we could improve the English text.
I recognise that as translators, we spot a lot of small details or bigger issues in source texts, but I know that in many cases the translator feedback gets lost along the way back to the source writer. So, spending time on detailed feedback of typos, missing words, unclear sentences, etc., can be very frustrating. And sometimes, as happens with editing, the brain corrects an error without even registering the issue.
Still, we did ask the translators for feedback several times, so I was a bit annoyed. At least, there are no major edits in the English that would require extra work from the writing team. That’s a victory!
The translation is now ready and formatted. The translation team is letting it rest for a while before reviewing it one last time. Hopefully, we will be ready to deliver this weekend.
Next week: the final recap blog post…
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