What is the best work flow for commissioning follow-on translation of docs with changes?

We need the help of the experienced in what must be a fairly common need that arises after an initial translation has been done... handling revisions.

I am about to send our Studio-using translator a significant number of help file topics that have changed since his initial translation, EN > JPN. 

Some of these changes are small (typos, rewording). Some of them are significant -- additions & changes in self-help steps, large areas of additional instruction or explanation, and the like.

Plus, since it is a help file and the subject software is still under development, there are some significant changes in how the software works, as well as changes in the user interface.

As I send the changes to our translator:

  • Does the translation management side of Studio automatically spot these changes? (I can't see how that would be possible). 
  • Do we somehow indicate where all the changes have occurred? If so, what are the best practices for listing or indicating these changes?
  • Do we just start over?

(If it matters, we are working with Help + Manual, a second-tier help authoring application that uses standard XML for storing topic and table of contents verbiage.)

If you have pointers to tutorials or articles, please pass them along. I've been through a lot of the Trados materials, but I'm still at the stage where I'm overwhelmed with what appears to be thousands of details about Studio...

Any help is much appreciated, believe me.

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  • Hi Dave,

    Nora's suggestion works well. But you can take it one step further by using PerfectMatch. This is particularly helpful if you don't have a TM or don't fully trust that any 100% match fits the particular context.

    In essence, you start from scratch with either a new project or by adding the revised/new files to the existing project. During the project creation wizard, you can match up every new/revised file with its corresponding previously-translated bilingual SDLXLIFF file, if available. You can also trigger PerfectMatch manually through the batch tasks.

    Studio will pre-fill your revised/new files based on the segments in the old files, down to the segment match value they originally had, if so desired. PerfectMatches are more reliable than Context Matches, which are in turn more reliable than 100% matches.

    You can choose in the settings to lock the PerfectMatch segments and exclude them from the analysis if the old files have already gone through QC; otherwise, you can leave them open for the translator.

    Hope this helps.

    Uta
Reply
  • Hi Dave,

    Nora's suggestion works well. But you can take it one step further by using PerfectMatch. This is particularly helpful if you don't have a TM or don't fully trust that any 100% match fits the particular context.

    In essence, you start from scratch with either a new project or by adding the revised/new files to the existing project. During the project creation wizard, you can match up every new/revised file with its corresponding previously-translated bilingual SDLXLIFF file, if available. You can also trigger PerfectMatch manually through the batch tasks.

    Studio will pre-fill your revised/new files based on the segments in the old files, down to the segment match value they originally had, if so desired. PerfectMatches are more reliable than Context Matches, which are in turn more reliable than 100% matches.

    You can choose in the settings to lock the PerfectMatch segments and exclude them from the analysis if the old files have already gone through QC; otherwise, you can leave them open for the translator.

    Hope this helps.

    Uta
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