An Insider’s Guide to Translating

Lift Education has considerable expertise and experience in developing other-language versions of resources for clients. Here is a brief guide to our process.

Is a translation needed?
Plain English
Briefing the translator
Quality assuring translations
Translations to design

Is a translation needed?

An ethnic group’s percentage of the total population is not necessarily a good guide to whether or not a translation is needed.

The reason why you want to communicate in another language is worth considering.

For example, you might have an important safety message that needs to be conveyed to people who genuinely can’t take in information provided only in English. Refugee groups, for example, may temporarily contain considerable numbers of people who cannot understand English when they first arrive in New Zealand, though this is obviously likely to change over time.

Or you might wish to support the teaching of a particular language in the school system. Identify this as a reason is important, as some language look quite different when written out for learners, as opposed to native speakers.

Or you might want to publish a resource on the web in New Zealand’s two official languages, as well as English. In that case, we can provide versions in te reo Maori and New Zealand Sign Language.

Yet another reason might be that you are targeting a particular export market. But do you know the difference between a font that looks dated and one that looks contemporary? Things like this change over time in every language, including those that use other alphabets and characters. 

Plain English

The first step in producing a good translation – a translation that really does meet the needs of people who prefer to engage in text in another language – is to develop a plain English version for the translator.

We break down long, complex sentences in shorter ones. We replace jargon and English colloquialisms with straightforward English.

Briefing the translator

The next step is to brief the translator. This includes:

• highlighting text that isn’t to be translated (for example, email addresses)

• supplying the translator with terms we want them to use (for example, if a translation forms part of a public service campaign, we might want the translator to use terms that already feature in other collateral)

• specifying the tone required

• specifying the intended audience (some languages vary the degree to which they use diacritical marks, for example, depending on whether the audience is native speakers or second-language learners)

Quality assuring translations

Quality assurance of translations can take several forms:

• The minimal amount of quality assurance we recommend is peer-review by a second native speaker of the language.

• A great degree of quality assurance is provided when a translation is checked by a language commission, for example the Vagahau Niue Language Commission in Alofi.

• Beyond checks for absolute errors, focus group feedback is always useful, and can be critical to some projects. 

After a translation has been quality assured by language experts, it still needs to be checked for style. That this is not widely understood explains many of the errors you see in translations. Language experts will tell you if the right term has been used and if it is spelled correctly, but they may not realise that it is meant to be in bold. A style editor still needs to check for formatting (the use of bold and italic, for example), punctuation, application of the client’s house style for text features such as bulleting, and completeness. (Translators have been know to miss whole lines!)

Translations to design

Have you seen pamphlets or posters in another language where far too much text has been squeezed into the available space? The tiny, hard-to-read point size used is often a give-away. To avoid such problems in multiple-language-version publication, we recommend that designers do their initial layout using the language that will need the most room on the page. Some Polynesian languages, for example, need as third as much space again as English.

We can give advice about this and other aspect of design, such as design “flip” to accommodate languages that read right to left. We can also advise on things to avoid, such as cropping heads (which is considered offensive by some cultures) and ways to avoid racist and sexist terms in other languages.

Once a translation has been designed, we can provide expert review, to assure that during the process of design errors have not been introduced. This is particularly important when languages use another alphabet.