Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Writing for Translation

An aspect of translation quality that is often not mentioned, is how much the quality of the SL affects the quality of the translation.

Courses on "Writing for Translation" such as this one are often popular, and, when done right, also useful, as technical writers may learn why, for example, concatenated strings are so much trouble for us.

One thing I saw when I worked in a large business software company, however, was that technical writers often resist any attempt to introduce controlled English, to limit their terminological choices, to introduce stringent editing rules, or, more in general, anything that they perceive as limiting their freedom and creativity.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just tell them their boni are dependent upon the timeliness of the translations into (named) target languages and explain how KISS and limited terminologies can speed Xlation up. Boni should also depend on cost minimisation which includes Xlation costs :-)