One of the most popular tools is those that allow you to do PEMT (post-edited machine translation). If you receive a long document and are on a short deadline, then one of the best things to do is to run it through machine translation first and then work on it from there. The most recognized and possibly used machine translation program is SDL Trados. One reason is that SDL Trados has a vast amount of features and functions.

With all the features and functions that SDL Trados comes with, naturally it is much more complex and difficult to learn to use than other, simpler machine translation programs such as Memsource, Wordfast, or Google Translator’s Toolkit. There are also programs such as MemoQ who have been gaining their own following of people who would prefer them to SDL Trados due to certain features or ease of use. However, if you have the time to learn SDL Trados and become able to use it effectively, then it can open a lot of doors for you to do many things.

Aside from machine translation, translators of websites can also rest assured that there are easy ways for them to translate webpages for clients. For instance, if a website is WordPress based, you can ask the client to install a plugin such as WPML. With WPML, all they will have to do is export the target page or post that they want to have translated as an xliff and send it to you, the translator. Once you receive it, you can open it in one of the machine translation programs that were discussed above and insert your translations as if it was a bi-column word file. Then after you are done, you can just send the client back the xliff file and they can import it back into their websites and the translations will be there as if by magic. The great thing about most of these kinds of plugins is that they are simple to learn and once you do learn them, they will save you a lot of time. If the website is not WordPress, there are other programs that you can explore and some webhosts even come with their own built-in language support.

There are many different types of specialized tools that will best fit the kind of translation job that you are working. Therefore, it is important for us as translators to stay updated and in the loop of technology that is being updated or developed regarding what we can take advantage of as translators. This way we can rest assured to do better work and help more people in need of translation.

One way is automating it. Some of the simplest mistakes that translators make involve mixing up numbers, conversions, or names. The easiest way to make sure that you have correctly reflected every instance mentioned in the source in the translation is to use a text compare. Of course, your translation will be flagged as being vastly different from the source, but it will let you know if the numbers, company names, and other words or numbers that have to be the same in the target as they are in the source are the same or not. It also takes virtually no time too. All you have to do is copy and paste then press a button. It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to go through everything depending on the length of your project.

Another way is to make it hard to make any mistakes from the very start. If you are translating into a new, blank document, instead try translating into the target document itself. You could even enter the strings into a machine translation so that you can see the translation and the source side by side. Doing this makes it much harder for you to make any typing errors when copying whatever needs to be the same in the target as in the source. If the document you have is not easily copied such as a pdf, you can use OCR to help make the text selectable and then copy it into a word document.

The next tip is the simplest and possibly the most obvious solution. Whenever you see something that has to stay the same between the source and target, just copy it from the source to the target. So for example, if you have a number like 1,000,231, then just copy it into the target. If you want to take this a step further, then you should highlight every instance of numbers or text that need to be the same between the two files and then you will be able to quickly identify the places that need to be checked before delivery.

Quality Assurance is a necessary part of the translation process but often not something that is effectively done due to time constraints or other factors. Hopefully with this post, you have learned a few tips about how you can make the process shorter, but without sacrificing any quality. If you are able to submit a translation that avoids minor mistakes can really help your reputation and make you stand out as a translator who can be relied on.