5 Reasons Why You Should Maintain A Good Work-Life Balance
Any translator or editor worth their salt has a sound grasp of basic good writing – correct grammar, spelling and punctuation, for instance. We should be pretty adept at knocking out a well-rounded sentence or two. Computer tools such as spellcheckers, grammar checkers, and even QA tools like Apsic Xbench (whose customisable checklists can detect many textual flaws) can help catch any oversights, if you can bring yourself to wade through the false positives.
Those considerations apply to any text. But some clients have specific terminology that reflects their market and their own favourite usage. We can enforce it in our translations for them by using a glossary and plugging it into our CAT tool.
But then there is a third linguistic layer that we may need to consider, which is not a matter of correctness or terminology, namely client style preferences:
- some clients may favour the serial comma as standard, others not;
- some may prefer their B2C contracts to refer to consumers in the third person, not the second;
- some may have a loathing for brackets, opting for paired commas or dashes instead.
Clearly, we need to remember all this somehow for each individual client (of which we hopefully have many) and apply it in our work.
If the client does not provide a style guide of their own, or if they do not follow a public standard – like Chicago or the MHRA – then we need to document their style ourselves.
One way is to build up a style-guide library, filed by client. This may comprise:
- a simple document or spreadsheet noting the various style points as they emerge during our working relationship with the client: we can then refer to the document as we write and at the final review stage;
- a client-specific style sheet / checklist to use in a software tool such as PerfectIt or Xbench to catch any points where we haven’t applied the style (although not all aspects of style lend themselves to that approach).
How do you document and enforce your various clients’ different style preferences?
Author bio
Oliver Lawrence is an Italian to English translator (specialising in marketing, tourism, contracts and plain language) and editor (working often on texts translated from Italian or written in English by non-native speakers). He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, a member of Plain Language Association InterNational (PLAIN), and an Associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. You can find him on Twitter @oliverlawrence1 and LinkedIn.
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Hi Oliver, Catherine,
Great post. You say “If the client does not provide a style guide of their own”. I find that’s the norm. It’s always great to receive a style guide or be told which to use, but many small companies don’t have anything and rely on us to use a given style reliably. When I’m not using my default US or UK English style sets, I mainly reply upon my TenT (Studio 2011) using the powerful concordance feature to find the preferred style usage. However, I do use client-specific style sheets for jobs with odd requirements where I know I’ll get confused or forget before the next job.
Onwards. Serial commas required today. 🙂
Karen
Thank you for sharing this, Oliver and Catherine. This is part of the tricky issues a translator deals with.
I agree that with repeat clients who often give us projects with similar content, and repetitive work, the CAT tool TM is helpful. I also immensely appreciate when clients provide me with their style/preferences guidelines, or glossary, especially with the type of document where a large part of the terminology is likely to have various possible translations. With new clients it’s part of our job to try and understand their preferences, and if they don’t provide us with guidelines, it doesn’t harm to ask for them, especially with clients who are not necessarily used to working with translators, and explain how guidelines will help us serve them better.
It can be a tricky thing to accomplish in periods when we’re overworked and have to make fast decisions, or with projects with a tight deadline. What I learned sometimes at my expense is, you have a doubt, ask!
As far as my clients are concerned, whether they provide guidelines or not, I start keeping a glossary or using TM when they give me projects on a regular basis. For those I have my TM’s organized by client.
The other element to take in consideration is also the translator’s preferences, which can be a tricky thing when working in teams on a single project. That is when client guidelines before to start the project are the most useful.
Now with new clients, I consider it part of my job to allow, within reason, and if deadlines allow it, room for edits according to client’s preferences, as part of my “after sales service” I guess.
However I am still looking for a better way to serve my clients in that regard, having all this stored in a centralized manner and one that would be less time-consuming.
Thank you, Oliver, for a thought provoking piece.
I personally hate it when my clients send me their list of preferred terminology that’s full of errors and they expect me to use those. I usually write to them and document the reasons for the required change, when it’s warranted.
And I usually create a client profile with their specific style requirements; I add to it as our relationship progresses and heads change. That’s a very good tool for me: saves me the gray cells I need to focus on their product :o)
@Karen: Thanks for your comments ladies 🙂 I’ve also found that most clients don’t have a style guide. I also rely mainly on my client-specific TMs and the concordance.
For some exceptions (regular clients who send more than 10 projects per month), I have created glossaries and notes (what to watch out for, specific terminology preferences etc.). For one of my very regular clients I even had the privilege to update and be in charge now of the Greek style guide which is shared among the Greek translators.
For non-regular clients and projects, I always ask at the beginning: any reference material, previous translations etc.? The answer is almost always no, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Back when I was reviewing Google translations, I remember their numerous glossaries (per product, sometimes more than one) and reference materials. It was good but also overwhelming and confusing at times. They’re probably more organized in that aspect now.
@Gio: I hate when they send me crap reference material too. I had to translate a TV manual earlier this week. The Studio file included the previous translations and they also sent a termbase with all the button translations, that I had to use in my work too. Terrible translations, full of mistakes, no consistency… But, I had to use those translations, no questions asked. Oh, and the source language was bad as well as it was clearly not written by native English speakers (Jinglish). I notified the PM and spent a very frustrating day translating and delivering something I wasn’t happy with. What else could I do? The PM in that case knew the problems but couldn’t communicate them to her client (or she did and they ignored her, not sure).