How to translate a project from beginning to end? Not only translation, but we also need to prepare and work through CAT tools like a style guide, TM (translation memory), TB (termbase), QA checker, and so on.
Choccolocco Regional Schools (CRS) has requested localization of “DTM_Workspace_Fractions_A_partial_en-US.pdf” into Simplified Chinese and Spanish (Puerto Rico and Spain) for delivery on Monday, November 22, 9 AM PT. We HGM. Inc, includes Nina Hampton, Nicholas J Magnolia, and I worked on this project.
In this project, Choccolocco Regional Schools send us a whole pdf and requested localization for page 60 for both Spanish and Chinese students because they are elementary school students and some of them do not understand English. The purpose of this project is to help those students better understand the teaching material.
Unfortunately, our client does not have any word documents for us. So the first thing our team did is to create a transfer the PDF into an editable word document. After that, we created a proposal and a new project in SDL Trados Studio. We use Trados’s report to check the translation rate and created a schedule list on our proposal. With the file prepared, we had a meeting with our client to confirm the detailed schedule and price list and check if he has other questions or requirements.
Here is our proposal.
A basic proposal needs to include the client information, our information, project overview, specifications, timeline, and Price (the most important part).
After confirming the details with the client, we started to work on this project. Based on our proposal, we created a TB (termbase) for this project and did pseudo-translation files to check if we had errors in our source file. Also, we created a style guide for translators.
Here is our pseudo-translation and style guide file. Since this is a math class material for students, for our style guide, we did not want to translate any numbers and punctuations like “=” and “-“. Also, we wanted to keep the address in the source language.
With TEP (Translation, editing, and proofreading), as listed in the delivery under the proposal, we delivered 1 source document (EN), target documents, Translation Memory (TM), termbase (TB), translation style guide, pseudo-translation, glossary, and target PDFs.
Here is the link for our final delivery folder.
CHRS01-07-F21M90111 – OneDrive (sharepoint.com)
Additionally, since we are a new team, we had many challenges when we did this project. What kinds of challenges did we have? How did we overcome them and learn from them? Please watch the video below.