At Alexika, we really love grammar, vocabulary, different languages and different cultures – take a look, for example, at our thoughts on Japanese translation. But it was during a recent visit to a client that it became clear that one of the less obvious and more mundane – but very real – ways that we can make life easier for clients is…by coping seamlessly with their changes in software and file formats.
In this case, technical manuals have been authored in Adobe InDesign, and we have translated many manuals to many European and Asian languages over the years – working with Adobe idml files. A lot of knowledge of the terminology and technical writing style has been accumulated by our linguists – and a big bank of stored translations using translation memory technology had been built up, which is very helpful for consistency, and also saving money by reusing previous translations.
But time and technology move on – and our client is moving towards an agile xml environment for their technical manuals, where diagrams and technical instructions can be presented in a much more accessible and dynamic way to engineers. Would this present a problem for our translators and linguists? Absolutely not – the change for the translation process is completely seamless!
So…how do we do it? We’re using market-leading Trados technology, right up to date of course, which means that our translators and reviewers work in exactly the same environment whatever the client file format. We select a file type from a very long list (a bit of it is shown below), and the translator is then working in the same very familiar way. All those previous resources – translation memory databases and stored terminology from previous work – can be used straight away with zero disruption.
And for our lovely client, it all just happens like it used to – the only difference being that translations will be delivered in the new format. So whilst changing or upgrading technical authoring software will cause some challenges – and might involve an element of retraining – for our clients, procuring high quality translation services just isn’t one of them.
At Alexika, we provide a professional and reliable high-quality translation service, and have been doing for over 20 years. As you’d expect, all of our translators are experienced, certified native speakers of their target languages. They have all the latest cutting-edge technology and subject matter knowledge at their disposal, co-ordinated by an experienced team of project managers. Get in touch to discuss your next translation project!