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Should Quality Be Really a Priority in Technical Translation?

Author: Tony Zhang
by Tony Zhang
Posted: Aug 22, 2018

When it comes to quality, a lot of varying and often conflicting notions prevail in the minds of people. In truth subject of quality is specific to the context at hand. In technical translation, quality is measured by some accuracy. So, to answer the question framed in the title, yes quality should most definitely be a priority for any Asian translation services, more so in technical translation.

What Define Quality in Technical Translation

But before you go looking for quality technical translation service, you need to know exactly what define quality in translation. Speaking specifically of technical translation, your focus should be on things like

  • Terminology
  • Style
  • localization
  • And language

All in all, a job that has all these areas well taken care of can be taken as a quality translation.

Why Is Quality Important?

Now coming to the second part of the question, why is quality important in technical Chinese translation services? In domains like medical, engineering, software, manufacturing, science, etc. precision is indispensable. These documents require the highest accuracy possible. Not only that, these documents also need to be written in the best-quality language, which is both lucid and professional. There is no room for errors in a manual. Neither can a technical document do with sloppy or average formatting. There are only two ways of translation a technical document, the right way and the wrong way. The right way warranties accuracy, while the wrong way is lauded with errors and mistranslations. So, of the two, the first is the way to go.

A professional translation company has a dedicated panel of translators that does the principal job of translating. Then the texts are passed on to a team of reviewers who scan them for quality analysis. Here the errors are identified and corrected, texts are improved and after an overall fine-tuning, the most technically accurate and visually interesting version of the documents are handed over to the clients. A quality translation job approaches documents with not just the aim to translate it from one language to another, but convert it to the most visually appealing and informationally digestible form. The target is to produce a caches of documents that readers easily understand.

Risks of Low Quality Translation

Now if you are not particular about quality, a lot of things can happen, the first of which is poorly translated content with tons of inaccuracy and misinformation. The readers aside not able to make sense of the text in parts may have to try and glean the meaning from the text which may or may not be correct. Furthermore, chunks of mistranslation poses a certain difficulty to the readers which can make reading a time-consuming exercise.

The top translation companies make it a point to have every document run by the reviewers whose sole job is to gloss over the documents making sure that it is only the best version that finally goes to the clients. For this, they work in close coordination with the translators throughout the project duration.

About the Author

Leas To Asia is a professional translation and localisation company which specialized in other languages translate into all kinds of Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.

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Author: Tony Zhang

Tony Zhang

Member since: May 10, 2017
Published articles: 13

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