Preparing your content for translation

From My Wiki

Preparing Work For Translation

10:50

Ed: who was at the Workflow session? That relates to this, which is a very important topic

Goran: How UIs offer translation? That reflects the whole. How to design UIs to best work with that?

Ed: Workflow in the industry already is project management, managing traffic. When you o multiple langauges you havee to manage the ttraffic. Proejct manageers are the lifeblood of all translation compnies. yOu get young people and exploit them and then they quit. So it works by document translation, the project comes in, the mager preps the files and then sends them out to translators. Most companies dont have an automatic system; its done over email. You have an addressbook and load up an email with a bunch of pepople and a text ,and then you have a TEP workflow. The Translator emails the translator back to the mamager, he then emails it to the editor, who emails it back to the manager, who sends it back to teh translator to check shes okay, and then back to him, and then it goes to a proof reader and finally back to the manager.

Tomas: This could be automated

Ed: Sure. translators are advanced for transltating text, but their use of software is very basic. most translations are done in a standard word processor. there is a project managmenet system in use, but only the managers have access to it.

Ed: So what I'd like to see, its UID project code, and there is all the metadata - who the translator and editors are - and the source text and later the desintaiton text, and when its all done it generates an invoice and sends it out. At the ig places, they work with companies like microsoft, and do so much work that the software companies make custom management software for them.

Tomas: Planner is a tool to do that kind of thing, and its good for the basic stuff. It lacks salut style network sharing stuff.

Goran: Its free software for project planning, but it doesnt do project organising.

Ed: For a long time, the translator was a little cog in the business and the translators werent respected very much. this is changing, the relatoinship between translators and project managers is very important. this relates to prepping material. you have avery technical text, and the translator has a big responsibilty to invent new terms to describe the meaning which might depend on concepts that dont exist. So if you just send text, its hard to understand the meaning because it has no context. so its critical that translators udnerstand what it is they are doing, and who will use it.

Stan: Most translators are users themselves, directly.

Ed: free culture is less like that, its people who are interested in doing translation in general

Tomas: or where foundations fund professionals to work on stuff

Ed: Right, so prepping matierla is imporant. Internationalisation is key here. This means, when you create something, you tihnk about language issues. So if you havea tool that can tak eorders, the way dates are written can change. Periods and commas in money figures. Glossaries are very key. people often use spreadsheets to mange glossaries in the industry. people like to see multilingual glossaries, as languages share so much. Acronyms are the biggest pain in the ass here. You have to explain what all the acronyms mean, and this is the case even for the most simple stuff you almost sblimintally assume is known.

Elad: Segmentation?

Ed: This is important and dififciult, it doesnt show the etext in context. its very important to have segmentaion and to have context too. tools can do segmentation but you have to have context too. strings can be just 1 or 2 words, "manual". What does that mean? Not automatic? A how-to book?

Elad: How to make segments consistent?

Ed: If you have many translators, you need someone as a "language lead" who is in charge, if its paid or not, the role is to keep a consistency there. 4 different styles in one text is a real pain. A style guide is tough but important, to stop this. This guides whats bold, whats capitals, the units and punctuation, what acroyms to translate and what not to do, and so on. That document is the best way to keep consistency. What happens if you have someone who just reads and edits the desitnaiton text without the source? they change it a lot, and it diverges from the source text.

Tomas: We have a problem where our writers need to know \LaTeX, and its important to show that if translators have any questions, they can call or contact the original author. you send text with style guides, with

Goran: we use translation memories a lot in free software UI; volunteers dont like checking in glossaries, stopping their little bit of work and getting out of "the zone". so the memories help spot style divergence.

Ed: some translators work offline, and they need as much information to work with in one go as you can send them.

Goran: When you have a volunteer, they work with several different workflows.

Elad: Free culture translation is about being efficient, because it cant afford inefficiency. And it has to be fun.

Goran: Is it important to build our workflow so PO files can be sent to translators?

Tomas: Version control?

Ed: You have a T-E-P workflow, and something into 60 languages, you need lots of traffic control. If you work on an online system, that can be quite sophisticated. Theres no need for version control because there are central "live" versions in webapps.

Goran: Distributed version control means you can revert and so on, "live" versions have their problems.

Ed: Ah yes, we get 'wikiwar' between two translators who push their own styles over each other.

Elad: In hebrew, we have feminiand and maculine things, and many things like "please click this button" have two gendered versions, and so we have to use "this button should be clicked" kind of workarounds.

Ed: this is where the style guides become key. Spanish has a big grammer of formal and informal that needs to be consistent.

Tomas: a "/" for "he/she" is not grammatically okay.

Ed: You're better off having a guideline for things and taking the responsibility away from individual translators.

Tomsa: If i have free culture works, I can't advise people on what to do because i don't know the issues specific to those langauges.

Ed: Thats what a meta-style guide is for.

Tomas: Right, so we need a central wiki for style guides that can be built on over time.

Ed: I can post style guides that point out what the decisions that have to be made actually are. I have them already.

Tomas: And its nice to have people add to that "I find it X Y Z to be common problems."

Stan: Style guides, glossaries, translation memories, discussion forums - there should be either a central one or a central directory of where they all are.

Ed: so you send a PDF file of the final thing to show the context, all those things, and the text thats segmented so its easy to work on.

Goran: Once in the past, we used a term for an english term, and then a new slightly different english term appears, and we would use the same old word in Serbian for that new word, but now we have no distinction ourselves. We also have two alphabets, cyrillic and latin, for our one language.

Tomas: Fran has seriously weird large regex sets that could do alphabet conversoin...

Ed: With Right-to-left langugaes you need to change the whole layout around.

Elad: Can you prioritise languages? If you do spanish first, then italian and french are easier.

ed: Well normally in the industry you have a deadline date, but in free culture there isnt a deadline. so doing one language first will inform internationalisation changes that will help all future tnralstions.

Tomas: We found this, you can't say "pringle can antenna" because pringles arent sold everywhere.

Ed: if you do something for a specific country, and have money, you can get a tranlation specific to that culture. but its better to just get a france-french and have it edited into canada-french.

Elad: Also machine translations work better in some pairs

Ed: Be careful of them, they are good, but they arent' **great** yet, it shifts it more to editing than translating though.

Tomas: "Scandinavian" exists as an amalgam. There is a "Universal Spanish" too, there are huge regional differences, in argentina theres a work for "have sex" that in spain means "pick up". And it dpeends a lot onthe context, french canadians are used to reading france french technical manuals.

Elad: In hebrew and arabic, we have fewer vowels, we have punctuation. The conformity with one rule is hard. Every spellchecker, you tell it if everything is okay, or with vowels or not.

Emin: With arabic its tough, yes. transliteration is very hard.

Elad: Its improant to run a spellchecker on your language before translating.

Goran: How supported are minor languages by spellcheckers?

Ed: Microsoft are putting a lot of money into this lately

Emin: We have local proprietary spell checkers, not Microsoft ones

Goran: I developed a serbian aspell dictinoary. I know how to make them.

Tomas: Dwayne also does this, for OpenOffice

Elad: what free spellcheckers are there?

Goran: GNU Aspell, and HunSpell, used by OpenOffice. ISpell is obsolete, Aspell is the new one. The algos are good, they support many langauges, but we need linguists who want to write the dictionaries.

Tomas: its possible to copy the words

Goran: There are funny hacks, you can generate a bruteforce dictionary, and spell check it, and that leaves you with a wordlist which you have the copyright to.

11:45