Problem summary of EasyInspect Project (1)

Last month I received a long-term project with large number of words. It related to a Reference Manual of Inspection System. In general, most translators think translating long-term project would have large advantage, the context can be understood easily and the overall consistency will be much better than other fragmental articles.

The general idea and contents between chapters can be mastered accurately. Also during the translation process, lots of repeated words and sentences will be memorized by Trados Translation software. It will bring great advantage to the translation and the whole task will become much easier.

In fact, while we are delighted with the advantage of such long project, we should also recognize the professional and technical knowledge will be reflected in the article all the time. In order to translate correctly, it’s very important to look up relevant professional vocabularies in the dictionary and comprehend the corresponding background knowledge.

Now I will list out the problems which encountered in the first three chapters for your better understanding. In the table of contents, 2 words “ Table” and “Figure” occurred above than 100 times, such as Table 1 and Figure 1, normally we will translated into “表格 1” and “图形 1”, it can be understood, but from the viewpoint of Reference Manual, Simplicity should be the 1st consideration and translated into “表 1”and “图 1”. Also in the article, a lot of units such as” mm, mA, nm, Voltage, meter, Kg and LEDs” occurred, sometimes we would translated these units and sometimes leave it alone. Actually it was a wrong disposal method.

In order to unify all the units, all the units with abbreviation, no need to translated and only the unit spelled into an integrated words in the sentence, thus we need to translated. This rule is really important, if we don’t pay attention to it, it will display a sense of non-professional to the reader.

Also I encountered words with Singular and Plural such as “LED and LEDs”，because these 2 words occurred many times, I used to copy them from the original source, actually it was not correct, we knew in Chinese no any difference between Singular and Plural, during the translation, the “s” at the tail of the word should be deleted.

Also in the first 3 sections, there are some words with ambiguous meaning which need to be figured out. A representative of the word is a kind of defect named “Streak” defect which occurred many times in the passage, it made me felt so strange when I first saw such defect, because I’ve been worked in electronic company and touched inspection machine and system, but I had never heard such defect.

Sending query to customer and finalized the answer, the exact meaning of this word as below “Usually the video of the camera signal is a single video signal line always updated with the scan frequency of the inspection system (Output video). The streak video is a very special video signal where single video signals are continuously counted together (integrated) to detect low contrast streak defects on the inspected material. The streak defect must be always on the same Crossweb position. The Chinese translation of this word should be “条纹缺陷”.

It occurred on the inspection material and the EasyInspection machine using digital cameras scanning to defect such kind of defect.