Having done a lot of proofreading these three months, here I want to give some advice on improving the text quality for translation services, hoping they are helpful for translators and editors, and we together work harder to deliver a good report to the customer.
1. After translating a sentence or one paragraph into target language, it is necessary to look back the translation, pay attention to the most-frequent errors – the space errors, the space between English and Chinese (one byte space), as well as the space between the tags and English or Chinese (one byte space) and other points for attention (please see our CCJK style).
2. When the customer provide the text in the form of Excel, usually we copy the text to Word, in order to make it easy to use Trados, however when we finish the translation and copy it back to Excel, lots of errors generated for a variety of reasons, such as space errors, misalignment or mismatch, we need to go over the translation in the Excel to reduces errors.
3. Missing to translate one or several words, when we use the Trados, which can automatically export the previous translation that we imported (when the match rate is greater than or equal to seventy percent by default), even though the match rate is equal to a hundred percent, we still can not make sure that it is quite correct, because the translation we imported into Trados may not be quite correct or the translation of the same words are different under different contexts. In the view of the above mentioned points, so it is imperative to review the translation.
4. Wrongly written characters deserve to be mentioned, some assignments may be pressed for time, whether we use Five stroke input method or Pinyin input method, the ghost words are inevitable, we need go over the translation in the same way.
Last but not the least, make sense of the requirements of the assignment from customer, it is the prerequisite for better translation.
To sum up, there is everything to check the work we done to deliver the better translation for our customers.
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