I do not need do translation by myself, but I have to do the proofreading part before I deliver finished projects to my clients. Sometimes it really takes a lot of time to complete satisfied projects.

Firstly, if a client is a long-time cooperator of our company, we will build a TM for this client for keeping consistency of translations. Thus, not only translators but also editors will save much time to finish a project. Once, I forgot to deliver the TM to the translator. When the translation is finished, I found I could not clean it as it was saved in bilingual format.

And several fonts existed in the translation. I have never encountered this problem before, as I always delivered TM to translators. In the end, it took me more time to deal with the problem than usual. I think it is a lesson for me to do it better and I must foresee problems that will be occurred.

Secondly, I did not know what was TEP when I joined this company. Then I recognized T stood for translation, E stood for editing, and finally P stood for proofreading. I thought there was no need to do this procedure. As there have been translation to editing procedures.

But other PMs told me do proofreading procedure helped a lot in smooth translation and could avoid mistakes. Then I did as they have said. Later, I found what they said are of great use. Once, I was checking a project from English to Chinese Translation. I found that a word “June” was translated into “7月”. I thought it was amusing. Why does such a tiny mistake occur? The translator could not have made such a mistake.

If you ask him, what is “June” in Chinese? He can tell you “六月” without thinking twice about it. But he did this mistake because he did not pay attention to it. What surprised me was that not only the translator did not aware of this mistake, but also the editor ignored it. A second example, I found it is quite necessary to check numbers in translations. For instance, 1,307,000 was translated to “1,307,000 万”. It makes many differences.

I am responsible for Merck projects. There is one word often occurred in Merck projects: MSD. This is translated into “默沙东” in Chinese. Perhaps the translator was so optimistic about his translation skills. He translated MSD instead of MDD (which is the original word in the file). I do not know what the client will think if we handed the project to him without checking detailed information.

Thirdly, make sure the requirements of our client’s. This is a vital procedure in our work. Good quality of translation does not mean you did a good job. To satisfy our client, we have to clarify the needs of them, such as what format the file they want (word, excel or pdf), what font they would like the files to be, if we should keep the format the same as the original one, or if we should do DTP and so on.

Read Also: Vocabulary Vacancy in English and Chinese Translation

These are precious experiences I have learnt in my job. Learning is a long way. This position requires not only translation skills but also skilled software usage and communication skills with clients as well as translators. Now I am forwarding the way to do it better.

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