The challenges of translating technical content: How to handle technical language and terminology when localizing

Translating technical content can be another challenge during the localization. Specialized terminologies, various data, technical language, and highly specialized topics require a deep understanding of the theme and experts' involvement.

The Lingohub team has created this article to give you the best practices for adapting technical materials and to answer any questions you may have on the subject.

Let's start from the basis

To have a productive conversation about the technical content, we must first clearly understand what falls under this category. Examples of technical content may include:

• Help centers - all the technical documents that provide instructions on how to use/install a product or service. Here often included screenshots, gifs, videos, or other visual materials.
• Technical specifications with a detailed product or service description, including its features, capabilities, and technical requirements.
• The API documentation contains technical information about integrating software systems.
• Release notes with information about the latest updates and bug fixes.
• Technical blog articles that explore technical topics in-depth, providing insights and analysis on the latest trend.
• How-to's and other educational information about using software or product.

When localizing, all these materials should be consistently and precisely translated as they are used to teach users and confirm business expertise. But as we mentioned from the start - this task isn't simple or carefree.

Challenges in translating technical content

Besides the common localization pain points with specific content, you can face deeper troubles like the following:

• Accurately translating technical content can be challenging due to the specialized vocabulary, terminology, abbreviations, acronyms, and technical symbols**.** It also requires accuracy and precision as it provides instructions, procedures, and specifications that must be strictly followed. Translators should deeply understand the subject matter and be familiar with the specific terms and jargon used in the industry.
• For technical content to be translated accurately and effectively, it is essential to involve and communicate with subject matter experts who thoroughly understand the topic (product managers, developers, CTO, etc.) To make this process well done, your team should have a single environment to collect data, communicate and build sources of truth like glossaries and style guides.
• Finding the local experts is also a challenging task. Imagine you need to translate your technical documentation to an absolutely new language, an English-Chinese pair, for example. In this case, you need to find someone who is not only a native speaker or close to this level but also can describe all the technical moments correctly.
• Translating technical content involves converting text that describes technical concepts and instructions from one language to another while ensuring accuracy and clarity. It often includes  variables and placeholders replaced with specific values at runtime (dates, times, currencies, measurements, etc.) For precise technical content translation, it is essential to identify and include the placeholders in the target text to avoid compromising the overall localization.
• Suppose your translators are not experienced in technical topics. In that case, their ability to translate technical content may differ from their performance on other types of content. To not get the {spelled-number} and {location} placeholders translated like {buchstabierte Nummer} und {Standort}, you need to create clear instructions or find someone who understands what should be done with the examples above or %setup%, %$1s, etc.
• Adapting placeholders for multiple platforms. You should consider placeholder conversion if you want to use the same text for different platforms. For example, iOS and Android have other naming conventions for placeholder variables - all instances of %@(iOS) must be converted to %s(Android.)
• Pluralization. Displaying numerical data correctly, which can vary depending on the language, is essential to technical localization. For example, in English, we use singular for one object and plural for more than one. Meanwhile, other languages, such as Arabic, have different rules, using the singular for one object, dual form for two objects, and plural form for three or more objects.

Read more →   Solving the p11n puzzle.

How to translate technical content successfully?

To help your team and be happy with the ready result, we suggest the following:

1. Provide as much info as you can. With the filled glossary, explicit instructions, and context, your team will better understand what and how it should be done.
2. Build effective communication and feedback systems. As mentioned above - the experts who understand the technical part are essential in the technical content translation. Providing convenient and helpful communication between your teams will save time and speed up the process.
3. Choose the proper translation management system. The best option to overcome the earlier challenges is to find a suitable TMS. One of its main advantages is that it can effectively manage vast amounts of data and specialized terminology and fix technical issues by providing a ready solution. Let's look at Lingohub as an example of TMS and how it can support technical content translation.

Lingohub tools and advantages that will support translating technical content

The right tool can simplify any issue - even the technical content challenges. And in Lingohub, we always do our best to get the customers an automated platform where their developers and translators can do their work without spending additional time on other activities like understanding each placeholder and filtering the text to find the content for translating and tech part or manual files import/export. Let's look at the features aimed to improve the localization team experience.

• Automatically detection of the placeholders and HTML tags to keep your resource files correct. Working with Lingohub, your linguists will see what exactly should be translated and which part of the files is technical information.
• Quality checks to ensure the texts are issue-clear. With Lingohub, you can create predetermined criteria for translators. For example, you always will be sure that the HTML tags aren't missed, there is no content duplication and trouble with line breaks.

• Support for i18next. This influential internationalization library helps developers implement technical content translation by separating the text content from the code and easily updating the translated content without the need to modify the code itself. By using this technology, your translators will focus solely on the language aspect of the content without worrying about breaking the code.
• Continuous localization = Continuous QA. The technical content requires precise attention at any stage. The Lingohub automatically detects new or updated strings - linguists translate them, and developers can push new content into repositories and release it —such an approach leads to continuous localization testing and fixing issues at the start.
• Term base. All the specified terms can be contained in the project glossary. The Lingohub advantage is that the term automatically suggests to the translators, so there is no need to find the appropriate translation and switch between the tabs.

• Discussion and segment description. Provide the team with the ability to discuss the project segments by mentioning them in the discussion window or leaving the appropriate comment in the segment description.
• Translators order. Sometimes finding an expertized translator is a challenging task. With Lingohub, you can hire professionals in more than 50 languages.

Conclusion

A systematic approach involving careful planning, preparation, and review is essential to translate technical content effectively. However, remember to find a solution to help with the technical issues and simplify the process.

At Lingohub, we recognize the specific challenges of translating technical content and have developed various solutions to help our clients confidently navigate this process. Feel free to schedule a demo with our team at a convenient time if you have any inquiries or want to discuss your project in real time.