Your position: Table of Contents > The most cost-effective and feasible way to handle repetitions > Application Case

 

Case: your client gave you a task to translate 10 equipment manuals in PDF format totaling 500,000 English words from English to German within 10 working days.
 


Traditional way of doing translation (no translation memory tools):
 

Step 1:

Re-typeset 10 PDF documents into MS Word documents;

Step 2:

Send these word documents to translators for translation;

Step 3:

Collect the translated documents from translators, and review these documents roughly.

Step 4:

Convert MS Word documents into PDF documents and deliver them to the client.


Disadvantages:

  1. Time-consuming: you must finish Step 1 before you send these documents to your translators. It will cost you several valuable days just for typesetting, and will make the stringent task deadline more stringent.

  2. Money-wasting: considering the nature of this project (featuring high repetitions compared with the previous equipment manuals already translated and with the current 10 equipment manuals themselves as well as high consistency of translation style with the previous translation), it is impossible to handle those repetitions without the translation memory tools. You have to pay a lot for those repetitions, this is the waste of your money, and most importantly, the task deadline and translation quality can not be guaranteed due to your re-translation of those repetitions.

  3.  Effort-demanding: considering the very complicated format of these Word documents after re-typesetting, it is a nightmare for a professional translator to handle these documents, and will exhaust his/her great efforts on those matters irrelevant to translation.

  4. Term-inconsistent: for the engineering translation project, the most important thing is term consistency, and for a professional translator, the most headache thing is also the term translation. It is impossible to guarantee the term consistency manually without the use of term consistency tools.


SDL Trados way of doing translation (with SDL Trados translation memory tools):
 

Step 1:

Open these documents with SDL Trados and pre-translate these documents;

Step 2:

 Send the converted SDL Trados files to translators for translation;

Step 3:

Collect the translated SDL Trados documents from translators and review these documents;

Step 4:

Save the target documents to generate the final translated word documents; convert these documents into PDF formats and deliver to client.


Disadvantages:

  1. Time consuming on format conversion - SDL Trados introduces the third party technology to convert the PDF document into Word document. Due to the limitation of technology, the converted Word document is not the same as its original PDF document. The worst thing is that SDL Trados does not allow any revision to the source document, which makes the translation process very difficult. Also, after you finish your translation with SDL Trados, and save it into target Word document, it will require you a large amount of time and efforts to review the format of target Word document, and make it the same as its original PDF document. It is a time-consuming and low-efficient way of doing translation.

  2. Inconveniency of documents exchange – Due to the bulk size of SDL Trados project files (generally, a SDL Trados project package is about several hundreds of thousand KB), it is very difficult to exchange SDL Trados project files among translators.

  3. Low efficiency on repetition processing – The core of translation memory tool is to handle the repetitions. For SDL Trados, in pre-translation process, it can only find the matched results by comparison with the already translated translation memory units, and can not screen out those repetitions compared the source document itself and the source documents in the same batch not translated yet. This will cause two serious problems, the first problem is the low efficiency of translation process; the second problem is the high translation costs.

  4. High costs on translation with SDL Trados – To complete a translation project, you must require all of your translators to have SDL Trados installed in their computers. To install SDL Trados itself is a very difficult and time consuming thing, you have to install many third party components, such as Java, Microsoft .Net etc., which will greatly influence the operational efficiency of your computer; another drawback of SDL Trados is that it is a new and very complicated stand-alone program, for those translators who are familiar with MS Word, it will cost them a large amount of time and efforts to learn and master a new program.


TransGood way of doing translation (with TransGood translation memory tools):
 

Step 1:

Save all these 10 PDF documents into text format, and merge these 10 text documents into one document.

Step 2:

Open this merged document with MS-Word, use TransGood “Repetition Pre-processing” Option 1 to handle the repetitions of all these 10 documents. In this process, TransGood will screen out:

  • All segments that are fuzzy matched by comparison with the existing translation memory;

  • All segments that are fuzzy matched by comparison with all these Source documents;

  • All table of contents which can be automatically updated after translation

  • All segments containing only numbers;

  • All segments of non-translation judged by TransGood according to the rules set up in “System Configuration”.

By this Step, TransGood will generate two new Word documents with simple and uniform format of paragraph by paragraph. The first Word document is for translation by translators; the second Word document is the terms extracted from source documents for translation by project manager.

Step 3:

Project manager splits the Word document generated in Step 2 and sends these documents together with the TransGood terminology text document to translators for their translation.

Step 4:

Translators import the terminology text document into their local TermBase, and begin to translate. At the same time, the project manager begins to translate the term documents generated in Step 2 and sends the new translated terms to translators again.

Step 5:

Translators update its TermBase with the latest term document sent by project manager and check the term consistency.

Step 6:

At the same time, the in-house typesetters will re-typeset these PDF documents into Word documents with the exactly same format.

Step 7:

Project manager collects the translated bilingual MS Word documents from translators, and Quality Check them to correct all term inconsistency and number errors, and also update its local translation memory database.

Step 8:

Project manager begin to translate the re-typeset MS Word documents generated in Step 6, review it, quality check it, and clean up to generate the final translated MS Word documents.

Step 9:

 Convert these MS Word documents into PDF format and send them to client.


Advantages:

  1. High efficient on format conversion – TransGood makes the process of format conversion and process of translation as two separate processes. Translators never need to care about the complicated format of documents to be translated. The in-house typesetters will care about the format conversion and typesetting, the professional translators only need to care about the translation process, and the most import thing is that these two processes can be carried out simultaneously, which can leave out more valuable times for translators to do translation.

  2. High efficient on translation process – As TransGood can screen out all those repetitions compared with the source document itself and the batch of source documents to be translated, it can considerably mitigate the workload of translator, shorten the turnaround time to client, and guarantee the consistency of translation style. For large engineering project, TransGood’s efficiency is several times higher than that of SDL Trados.

  3. Cost effective - As TransGood can screen out all those repetitions compared with the source document itself and the batch of source documents to be translated, it can dramatically cut down the translation costs compared with other translation memory tools in the world. For large engineering project, TransGood can save you approximately 30% translation costs compared with SDL Trados.

  4. Term consistency – the only feasible and efficient way which can guarantee the terminology consistency in a real sense.

  5. High mobility and zero cost – Compared with SDL Trados, which is several hundreds thousands KB in size and the installation of which will spent you almost a hour, TransGood is only several hundreds KB, and its installation process is just a click-away. It is a green software in a real sense. Also, TransGood introduces Windows Unicode text documents as its translation memory basis, which makes its file sizes extremely small compared with SDL Trados (less than 1 percent of SDL Trados). The most important thing is that TransGood has a free version which can be downloaded by any translator in anywhere around the world. Most of its functions, especially the translation memory functions, are permanently free of charge. TransGood is 100% compatible with SDL Trados, which means that TransGood translation memory and SDL Trados translation memory can be exchanged freely.

  6. Translator friendly – When processing repetitions, SDL Trados pre-translates the source document, mark all 100% matched TM units, and send this file to translator for translation. The 100% repeated texts marked in this document will be deducted when calculating the translation fee for translator. This, to some extents, will make translator unhappy if there are many repetitions in source document, for example many tables with same table header etc., as those repetitions can be easily handled by translator through “replacing” function of MS Word if there is no translation memory tool like SDL Trados.

TransGood handles repetitions smartly. TransGood deletes all these repetitions and only extract the non-repeated paragraph for translation by translator. For translator, this makes no difference as to translating an ordinary word document; on the other hand, if translation company does not use TrandGood to handle repetitions, the translator can enjoy the great advantages brought about by TransGood when handling those repetitions.