Localization best practice for translation customers
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Here are some localization best practice ideas. Buying translation services for software localization projects can be tricky and may involve some challenges. Where to find professional linguists? What are good prices? How do you manage a team of translators? Do I need localization software tools? How do I know who to hire? What are established best practices for translation customers? You are not the first person to buy translation services. Here are some essential and basic guidelines for translation customers.
Lingohub recommends these 7 tips for your project
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Plan ahead. Hiring the right professionals is no job for the last minute. You want the right translators that fit your product needs, consider that the ideal translators might not be available if you approach them too late.
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Pricing. Great quality has its price. You should be willing to spend resources on quality translation, your own customers will notice if you skimped.
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Review. Have an additional set of eyes review all translation, for quality and consistency, especially when several people work on larger projects.
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Finalize your text. While Lingohub’s workflows won’t cause headaches if the original changes, we recommend finishing the original text before hiring translation, otherwise it will become harder to calculate costs.
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Context. Provide the translators with as much information about your product as possible, inform them about the target audience/customer, provide styleguides and manuals. Lingohub lets you provide meta information and screenshots, make use of that. The more context a translator has, the better.
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Hire professionals. Pros translate into their native language. Pros deliver a certain quality, and pros don’t translate for the first time. Hire students, academics or hobby translators at your own risk, fall back on in-house expertise only if the required qualifications are available.
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Look for domain expertise. A technical text on a certain subject matter needs a translator who has expertise in the subject. Translators, while usually covering many areas, cannot be experts in all technical domains. Look for domain experts.
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These are just some basic guidelines and by no means an exhaustive list. We will follow up with some blog posts that go into some more depth.
For further reading we recommend the ATA “Getting it right” reader
“There are hundreds of ways a translation project can go off track – ridiculous deadlines, misapplied machine translation, poor project management. You know because you've seen it all. But have your clients? Be sure they know the value you bring to their business and keep them coming back.” - https://www.atanet.org/publications...
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