Looking for general advice. Best way to approach this project?

Hello, 

I'm in charge of Trados implementation at our company. I'm fairly new at this. We are a Tokyo-based electronics manufacturer. I have been asked for assistance by our Korean division to help to translate some manuals from Japanese into Korean. I'll be remotely teaching their in-house engineers how to translate using Trados. I'm wondering if I'm approaching this project the correct way to make full use of Trados Studio 2017.

I'm trying to build a TM and TB for them to get them started.

At my disposal is a reference manual available in Korean and Japanese. I've asked to get the files separated by chapter in Word files so that they can be aligned and turned into a TM. I'm hoping the automatic alignment will work better if things are split up into smaller sections. I may even split them up more. From there we'll have a good TM.

Secondly, the TB. Would it be better to make a TB based the aligned data? Like by turning the alignment files into xliff files and making terms within Editor? Or is there another method? I have MultiTerm extract but it does not work with Japanese. OR, should I use another site I've used to extract terms from the yet untranslated document and work from there?

Also, there'll be about 3 people doing the translation. We do not have Groupshare or a server based TM, so I'm thinking that only on translator should work at a time, from the beginning of the manual. One person does the first third of the manual, updates the TM, and the next person does the next third, using the TM from the first third. And so on.

Am I going about this right way? If anyone has any thoughts on how to help this go as smoothly as possible, I'd welcome the input.

Best regards,

Keenan

  • Hi ,

    I'd hoped you get some good advice from some practitioners... but looks like you only have me, at least as a starter for 10!

    TM seems a good approach. You could also try aligning the files, as they are DOCX, with LF Aligner which is a free alignment tool that is easy to use, has a more flexible editor and you could throw the files in without splitting them:

    sourceforge.net/.../

    On the Termbase. I would use Fragment alignment for this if you have SR1. You can add terms to your termbase in one click from the Fragment Match results window. It'll also be interesting to see how good the matching is in your language pair!

    Regards

    Paul

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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  • Hi ,

    To add to Paul's excellent suggestions, if you have 3 translators working on the text either concurrently or consecutively, I would recommend you use a 4th person, a proofreader/reviewer - preferably a Korean national who understands the technology the document is covering, to review the whole translation in Studio and smooth the three texts so that they are inter-consistent. If they know how to work with Studio they can use filters to find all instances of source terms they need to research, as well as the verification tools.

    I sometimes do proofreading jobs that have had to be split between two or more translators who worked concurrently because of time pressure then I read the whole document to make sure it reads well in English and that the terminology and phraseology are consistent. This doesn't mean that a translator is incorrect if they use a different term to another of course, it just means that the document is less confusing if terms are the same throughout. A termbase can't cover every single term that may be used and often there are more than one possible translation given in termbases anyway.

    I realise cost may prevent this but it produces a better final document.

    All the best,

    Ali

    (Edited)